Getting a Life
by Tierfal
Summary: Hermione Granger loves metaphors. Draco Malfoy loves Muggle cigarettes. What happens when the king of Slytherin and the queen of the library collide?
1. Beyond the Clichés

_Author's Note: I don't put much stock in author's notes, though I suppose they have their uses. Hence my using one._

_For starters... This doesn't have the integrity of its predecessors. If they were ten-dollar fics, this is a two-dollar fic. But I hope that I will be able to succeed in making it fun._

_This story occurs somewhere, at some point, before a lot of things have happened, and after other things, as most fics tend to do. That's the whole idea, isn't it? Rebelling quietly against what the author intended when it doesn't meet the most precise of our expectations?_

_Ha?_

_I have come to realize that what I like about fan fiction is the ability to take other people's characters and settings and play around with them. That and the fact that I don't have to plan anything, because the story can just wander like a lost child in a supermarket and no one will really care._

_So I've hijacked these characters and dared to try to get in their heads first person, which leaves a lot of space for me screwing up bad. I'll do my best. And I know, I know, I know that this same old scenario has been replayed countless times, but here's to one more worthless writer trying to pass the time. And trying to procrastinate on said writer's homework._

_Once more into the breach, dear friends._

HERMIONE

I could feel it slipping away. Sleep, I mean. There was some unidentified creature, or concept, or thought out there, in the darkness of my unsettled mind, and it was pulling steadily on the rope, hand over hand, uninterrupted and unceasing, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Perhaps I could have caught that rope, the end that was rapidly disappearing into the blackness of the tunnel. Perhaps I could even have found a knot tied in the coarse fibers of it, and latched onto it like a lifesaver in a hurricane, and yanked back with all of my might. But either way, however much I'd tried, whatever ludicrous excuses for stratagems I'd tried to apply, I would have lost that little tug-of-war. The rope would have burned the skin right off of my palms, stripped them clean, left me bleeding and empty-handed, and the sandman, that cruel, cruel master of sleep, wouldn't have cared a whit.

Sleep is a little bit like love, in that way.

Bleeding, and empty-handed.

It was absurd. You'll agree. Of course you will. It was the half-mad fancy of a lonely little girl, and you'll know it, and you'll laugh at me, just like everyone else would if they knew.

I can't blame them for their prospective laughter. It's all very risible. Ha, ha, ha. Stupid little girl. Doesn't she know anything outside of her stupid little books? Doesn't she know that there's a world out there, and that long words and little facts and teachers taken in by her endless efforts won't help her when the chips are down and the cards are dealt?

Of course I knew that. Of course I knew the terror that skulked, leering, in the back of my mind, waiting for me to turn some corner and walk down some shadowy hallway so that it could pounce and rip my articulate little throat right out. Dear _God_, how could I possibly _not_ know the face of my tormentor?

But I digress.

Allow me to couch it in clichés. I will begin thusly:

Once upon a time, a princess (that's right; princess, I said) with beautiful golden curls (not stupid, ugly brown hair that revolted against the hairbrush at every opportunity) and lovely blue eyes the color of summer sunlight on a gentle pool (do I have to clarify that her eyes were most certainly _not_ brown?) met a handsome prince, and the two fell deeply in love, and there were no wicked step-mothers or evil witches (though a lot of average, overwhelmingly human ones happened to be around) or talking bunny rabbits. And then the handsome prince… Who knew what the handsome prince was thinking? Stupid blighter of a handsome prince; I'd lop his head off if it wasn't so handsome; I'd…

I'm not convincing you, am I?

I didn't think so.

Let me try a different cliché. "It all began," they start. Here we go; one more try.

It all began one sunny afternoon when I was on the way back from… something. Some sort of… Oh. I remember. I was on the way back from the one place where no one ever cared to tag along: the bathroom. Consequently, I was alone for once. And that was when a handsome prince, or at least a daunting aristocrat, by the name of Draco Malfoy happened to stroll by.

Now, I had taken a lot of his off-the-cuff insults, the little cruelties peppered with a jealous four-year-old's spite, the snide comments and the sneers and the snickering behind my back. I was used to "Mudblood," finally; it was petty and it didn't mean anything, really. I was used to the immature little things he didn't even try anymore, like "Know-It-All" and "Rabbit-Teeth" and whatever else his paltry arsenal encompassed. But today, for whatever reason, Draco Malfoy, endowed at birth with a name entitling him to mete out hurt feelings as he saw fit, said something that surpassed anything he'd said before.

"Whore," he remarked, almost to himself, as we passed by, close enough that the movement fluttered the fabric of our clothing on either side.

I stopped. I turned around. And I looked at him—or, more accurately, at his retreating back.

"_What_ did you call me?" I demanded.

He turned as well, to face me—slowly, lazily, uncaring, unconcerned, un_couth_. I hated him. Hated him, hated him, hated him; him and his lightning-blond hair and his devil-may-care little smirk. The bastard. The absolute _bastard_.

"You heard me," he declared calmly.

I wanted to slap him. I wanted to slap that nasty smirk right off of his nasty face and beat the nasty thoughts and the nasty words right out of his head with it. I didn't care about wands, I didn't care about magic; I wanted to hit him and feel his skin give under my palm and watch it redden where my hand had been. I wanted to do it personally.

And then… I was. And I had. And I was standing back staring at him in utter amazement, staring at the blossoming pink marks on his cheek, unable to believe that I'd put them there.

He blinked. Then his eyes narrowed to slits, reducing him to one of the feral creatures that lurked in the forests of nightmares, bright eyes glinting coldly and mercilessly from between the trees. It was a very difficult thing to meet those eyes.

"How _dare_ you," he spat. "You—"

I will allow you to fill in the worst word you can think of, the word that would hurt you the most of any in the dictionary or outside of it, because the effect that such a word would have on you would be the one that his word had on me.

I felt tears in my eyes, sharp tears, hard tears, edged like diamonds. They were tears of outrage, of helplessness, of anger and of anguish and of a thousand things at once, and it was then that I did something I'm not proud of.

"You _bastard_!" I screamed at him, ignoring the replications of my voice against the walls, the echoes that would surely reach some teacher, the reverberations damning me with their audibility. "You have _no_ right to say something so _horrible_ to me, and you _know_ it, you fucking _bastard_! You have _never_ had any right to say things like that to me, and you are petty, and mean, and you are a fucking _bastard_ besides, and I'd _kill_ you if it was legal, and you're a stupid asshole son of a _bitch_ and I wish you were _dead_!"

Dignified, I know.

Accordingly, Draco Malfoy threw his head back and laughed. It was a jackal's laugh, sadistic and oh-so pleased. The pink space imprinted by my hand had widened and refined itself into a fairly recognizable shape with five fingers. If that didn't fade from his pale, uppity little cheek, someone would be asking about it.

"You think," Draco Malfoy said then, managing to gasp the words out between gales of laughter, "that if you throw a few four-letter words at me, I'm going to curl up in a little ball of solid remorse and go home and be a good boy from now on?"

"'Bastard' has seven letters," I informed him, trying to stem more tears by keeping my voice steady, keeping it cold, keeping it infuriated. "Since you apparently can't count past five."

"Oh, _touché_," he crowed. "That was _truly_ brilliant. Granger…" He wiped tears of mirth from his eyes. He was so damn _complacent_. "Get a life. Get a sodding life, and get a sodding brain to go with it, you bloody idiot."

He turned his back on me and walked away.

Well, he tried to. His attempt was interrupted by the fact that I tackled him to the floor by the ankles and began to hit him in the face.


	2. Muggle Ingenuity

_Author's Note: Nothing to note but that my dear, sweet readers will probably have to wait over a week for the next update, I'm sad to say._

DRACO

I knew that the guys were going to be up late, as usual—as always, really. That knowledge gave me the invaluable ability to set up an air-cleansing spell (a nice bit of work I was somewhat proud of) and smoke to my black little heart's content.

There were a few things I'd observed about Muggles after stepping off of the manor and into a much stranger, much odder, and much more perilous world—one that was real, undiluted, uncensored, and known as Hogwarts. There were more things I'd observed on jaunts off-campus with my dearer friends over the summer, primarily that the two worlds were melting together at the edges, and little pieces were seeping through the failing barrier both ways. That fuckoff Potter's driving around in Weasely's dad's car made it into Muggle newspapers; their mass-market products slipped inconspicuously into our purchasing habits. The two worlds blurred a little. It was kind of disgusting, and it was also kind of thrilling.

The best thing about Muggles was that, for all their incapacity to perform or even _understand_ magic of any sort, they had compensated as best as they could. They were persistent little bastards, and they had done their damnedest to make up for the disparity with ingenuity. Although I would have subjected myself to a thousand nameless terrors before I stooped to taking a class on it, I had to grudgingly admit that their technology, as they termed it, was interesting enough. Guns were wicked, and so were tanks. So were more innocuous things like light-switches… I mean, come _on_!… But the best by far, although AK-47's put up a good fight, were the drugs.

All due credit to Nicolas Flamel, and whatever, but the fogey never brewed anything that could compete for a minute with vodka and cigarettes.

It was the latter that I was particularly attracted to. Muggle movie stars loved them, or pretended to, which added a nice air of distinguished mystery to my popping one in my mouth and setting a flame on the end with a spell or with one of those flicking-things they called lighters, depending on my mood, but it wasn't the distinguished mystery that I really liked. Who the hell was going to see me anyway? No, and it wasn't the way that they dampened the appetite a little—though the less I had to stomach of that shit they fed us at school, the better. The thing I liked most about cigarettes was that they calmed me down in a way that nothing else really could.

Maybe some of it was psychosomatic, since after the first few tries, I _expected_ them to have that effect, but a lot of it was chemicals entering my bloodstream and smoke wafting towards the ceiling and into my eyes and good, old-fashioned Muggle ingenuity. I had to hand it to them.

There was, naturally, a little bit of shame to it. Quite honestly, who the hell wants to turn to Muggle drugs to quiet that nagging inner panic and hack it down before it builds? Just how pathetic is that? I mean, _they_ didn't need _our_ world. Why should we need parts of theirs? It didn't seem right.

There was also a bit of a worry that I'd soon have little black lungs to go with my little black heart, but I tried to ignore that. Hopefully Pomfrey could clean that kind of thing up in a matter of seconds anyway.

The reason I was going through cigarettes like Vincent Crabbe went through pastries—with relish and reckless abandon—on this particular day was because of a particularly annoying Mudblood by the name of Hermione Granger.

After retrieving the damnable book I'd been stupid enough to forget in McGonagall's class, I'd run into her, and we both knew that we could very easily have just walked on by with our heads down. But where was the fun in that?

Today, more than ever, I had wanted to get a rise out of her. I didn't know exactly why, only that I had to do it. It was a compulsion. She'd been adjusting quickly to the child's-play I'd been working with before, so I had to up the ante if I was going to spark a reaction. Well, that suited me just fine. There wasn't much I wasn't willing to say.

It was all going very much in my favor until the little barbarian tried to murder me with her bare hands. Trust a Mudblood.

Obviously, an indignity like that can't stand. Accordingly, I shoved her off and hit her back. Chivalry is dead. As far as I was concerned, so was that remorseless bitch of a Mudblood, because I was going to kill her.

We rolled around on the floor a bit, pummeling each other ineffectively. We didn't get too far just smacking each other before I remembered who and what I was, at which point I scrambled back a little without getting up from the floor, whipped my wand out and pointed it at her, opening my mouth for whatever hex or curse or jinx or nigh-unprintable cuss was ready to come out. Damn her to hell, Granger was faster.

"_Expelliarmus_!" she screamed.

God damn it, I thought.

Before my brain had even completely finished mumbling those three words to itself, my wand was in her hand. Then, like a child throwing a tantrum, she pitched it away, and the little stick of wood—for that's all it really was, if you think about it—went flying end… over end… over end… and came to a clattering landing near a huge stone flowerpot. The flowerpot in question stood proudly on an Oriental rug in a long hallway, the left side of which let in, through an almost uninterrupted mass of windows with diamond panes, a very considerable quantity of golden afternoon sunlight. On a different day, I might have paused to reflect on these windows (laugh at that pun and I swear I'll kill you), or, more likely, the most entertaining way to break them, and the best escape route after so doing. Today, however, was not a day for reflection of any sort, as Hermione Granger was pointing a wand in my face.

Stupid Mudblood.

She got to her feet, panting a little, and started to back down the hallway without lowering her wand.

"I'm warning you, Malfoy," she said slowly, probably thinking she sounded dangerous and imposing. Far from it. "One wrong move…" Good _God_, where was she getting the lines? Honestly, girl like that should have been able to come up with _something_ that didn't sound like she'd stolen it from a bad movie. "…And I'll zap you so hard you won't feel it when I drown you in the lake after that."

Admittedly, that was original.

I'd glared at her, darkly, or as darkly as you can glare at people when you've got what an early and short-lived tutor called "happy eyes" (I almost died of shame), until she disappeared off into some adjoining corridor, at which point I picked myself up from the carpet, muttering more nigh-unprintable things.

A First Year, whistling insouciantly, chose that moment to start strolling down the corridor. It was _inconceivable_ that Draco Malfoy would bend down to retrieve his wand in front of a _First Year_, so I deemed it better to loiter by the wall and glower until she'd passed.

Glowering did the trick. It usually does. She quit whistling faster than you could have said "_Silencio_" (had you had your wand), ducked her head, and started strolling a hell of a lot faster.

I couldn't help the triumphant little smirk that alighted on my lips at that. Natural reflex.

Back to the dorm, and to the beautiful little tube of paper and tobacco that came to rest between my fingers. Not without some pleasure, I considered the fact that I probably looked like a billboard. Or at least until I pulled out the wand.

"_Flagrate_," I muttered.

Gratefully I breathed in the wispy incense of it and felt myself relaxing despite the ringing that Granger had inflicted upon my innocent ears and the series of bruises that had begun to form on my innocent face.

Stupid Mudblood.

I'd get her. One of these days, I'd be faster.


	3. A Brief Waltz

_HERMIONE_

Harry and Ron were impressed with my injuries.

They were not so impressed with my excuses.

"Oh, come _on_." Ron rolled his eyes at _Er… I fell._ "Even you're not _that_ clumsy. Besides, what'd you do for a bruise that size, fall into a coat-rack?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?" I responded, attempting to sound mysterious.

Unfortunately, my "mysterious" tended to coincide with most people's "stupid." Consequently, Ron raised a coppery eyebrow.

"Wouldn't've asked if I didn't," he replied caustically.

My turn to lift my gaze to the ceiling. "Well, get over it. I'm not telling."

Harry, who had been considering this exchange, opened his mouth.

"Don't even utter a syllable," I warned him.

Compliantly, he shut his mouth again. Good thing one of them was considerate, or I would have obliterated them both with a well-timed spell by now. Ronald Weasley was lucky he was alive.

I would like to say that the next morning dawned pale and clear, the rising orb of the sun warming the fragile leaves of the greenery below, rousing bushy-tailed squirrels and talking bunny rabbits and beautiful princesses alike from their gentle slumber. But it didn't. The next morning dawned mercilessly frigid and edged with a biting wind, and that was what this not-so-beautiful not-so-princess woke up to, earlier than usual because her blanket had slipped off of her bed and fallen to the floor.

As if mornings aren't bad enough to start with.

Ron, Harry, and I trudged our way to Potions, me pretending not to trudge because I was supposed to be the chipper one. Today wasn't a very chipper kind of day. Today was a sit-at-home-and-nurse-my-wounds kind of day.

But if I'd stayed home, Heaven only _knows_ how much Malfoy would have been able to gloat. No, no gloating for the Gloat-Master on this particular morning, gelid as it was.

We took our usual seats, Ron on Harry's left and me on his right, finding the usual safety in numbers as Malfoy and his darling (read: repulsive) cronies smirked over at us as if they had nothing better to do. As I ignored them, after noting with triumphant glee the purplish contusions highlighting Malfoy's angular cheekbones, I couldn't help but wonder what the three of us looked like when we wandered the halls of Hogwarts. Were Harry and Ron a frail little female's bodyguards, or were Ron and I Harry's insufferable sidekicks? Or were Ron and I supposed to fall in love, with Harry presiding over the proceedings and giving his blessing?

I turned my thoughts to Potions instead. It'd be my own doing if _those_ made me throw up.

Potions went as Potions usually did: Snape asked questions at the beginning; I'd prepped and knew the answers; he grudgingly called on me because no one else had bothered, because they knew I would have; I looked like a know-it-all; I felt kind of stupid trying to look so smart; and we went to work. We sliced things, diced things, minced things, and generally performed all the functions of your average infomercial product. When we'd finished, most of the class was glaring at their partners over their hissing, spitting, intractably misbehaving concoctions, and Neville and I were shaking hands. I'd decided to take pity on the poor fellow this morning, and when I relegated his activity to cutting things into little pieces and handing them to me as I required them, it went over fairly well—provided that I reminded him every few minutes to pretend that we were in Herbology, and that his newt spleens or what have you were actually plants. The kid liked plants, and they liked him. It worked. Psychology is a beautiful thing.

Snape gave me some good marks even more reluctantly than usual, since I was partnered with poor Neville. It was unfair, but Snape was always unfair, and that was something that you just had to deal with. At least I wasn't, you know, _Harry_ or anything. Snape was more liable to dive headfirst into an acid bath than to give Harry a good grade.

I had to run for the next class I'd jammed into my schedule right as Potions ended, so I headed straight for the exit. To my displeasure, so did a particularly scummy daunting aristocrat with a feral glint in his eyes.

We reached the door at almost precisely the same moment, so Malfoy elbowed me.

"Out of the way, Mudblood," he ordered.

I was so tired of that. So tired.

So I pushed him in return. "_You_ get out of the way," I shot back.

"Don't touch me," he snapped.

"What, afraid some of my intelligence will rub off?" I retorted.

"If you had any, maybe," he rejoined. "I do know, however, that you're shedding Mudblood skin cells all over my nice cloak."

Creative, I had to say.

"Why are you going outside in such a hurry?" I inquired, jumping to a new subject. "Aren't you worried that a hippogriff's beak might _graze_ your arm again, and you'll be incapacitated for a week?"

He pushed; I shoved; he nudged; I jabbed back, just as hard. Then—

"What the hell are you doing to Hermione?" Ron demanded.

Ah, good old sidekick Ron, ready to get fired up over anything at all, so long as it involved swearing at Draco Malfoy.

"Fuck off, Weasley," Malfoy responded immediately. As if motivated by the presence of an interloper, he shouldered me out of the way at last and darted up the stairs, "nice cloak" swirling around his ankles, and disappeared down the hall. Crabbe and Goyle, ever the faithful little tagalongs, lumbered after, like pull toys, trailing in the wake of the boy who had passed before, one colder and more ambitious even than the gray dawn had been. They were tributaries to that mad, rushing river, a river fraught with whitewater, carried by a roaring undercurrent even stronger than the evident flow. Their homage fed his ego, swelling the water further up the banks. What was going to happen when that river overflowed? Was the world even prepared for a flood of that caliber?

I made it to my class on time—barely—and managed to forget the river and my lack of life preservers in the midst of a pretty good lecture. But it wasn't all fun and games. Oh, no. In fact, it wasn't much of either.

That afternoon, Ron and Harry managed to claim the Quidditch field for Gryffindor before anyone else could beat them to it. I stayed in the common room doing homework, and, before long, my hand started cramping something awful. It was about at that time that some mischievous second year rolled a lit smoke bomb down the stairs, and the heretofore tranquil common room was summarily swathed in pungent purple smoke, thick mist that bit ravenously at the eyes and the throat and sent the majority of us diligent students directly out the portrait-hole, shouting our protests over our shoulders. For my part, I was hoping that McGonagall would catch the culprit shortly and flay him alive. Or at least stuff a lit smoke bomb down his throat.

Since I was already outside, and since my hand hurt like mad anyway, I decided to take a little walk instead of returning directly to the common room, slaughtering the first guilty-looking second year to cross my path, and clearing the air of sulfurous fumes. Jamming my hands in my pockets to warm them, my vague gladness that I'd left my books behind tempered by my vague concern that they would smell like smoke forever, I started for the lake, thinking I might find some lasting peace there.

Instead, I found Draco Malfoy.

This time, our favorite little prince-in-his-mind was unwrapping a packaged muffin, from which he then proceeded to tear small pieces to throw into the lake. I considered turning to leave, but my hesitation to go left me staying. It was, despite the aristocrat's presence, indeed very peaceful, and that was what I had sought. The water lay flat like a mirror but for the little rippling waves raised and carried across the surface by a tugging wind, and blushing autumn leaves broke free of spindly tree limbs and went sailing away through the crisp air. Not exactly a beach in southern France in late May, but I thought it was very lovely.

Then, before I could wonder why he was throwing most of his muffin to the lake anyway, Draco Malfoy put a sizeable piece in his mouth and swallowed it. He blinked, looked down at his hands, and let the plastic flutter to the ground, its surfaces glittering in the light that penetrated the gloomy clouds. Slowly, as if trying to add drama to a scene in a movie, he sank to one knee, and then blood erupted beneath the skin of his face, flushing it immediately in a patchy, dangerous red like the mottled patterns of a moth's wings, and he abruptly commenced rasping for breath.

In an unthinking instant, I had moved, and the plastic was in my hand, the label under my eyes; they flicked next to Draco Malfoy's as he looked up at me with horror and a reluctant plea. There was no time to ponder the finer points of the situation, so I didn't. I grabbed his arm, pulled him to his feet, and began dragging him towards the Hospital Wing.

I don't really know how we got there. I don't remember anything of the trip except for one big haze of stumbling down the corridors, ignoring the gawking onlookers, listening desperately for the next wheezing breath by my ear. Somehow, we made it; somehow, I shoved the door open; somehow, we staggered in, like the winners of some deranged three-legged-race; somehow, I managed to gasp out "Ana—_(pant)_—phylactic;" and then I didn't have to be the hero anymore. Once I'd uttered the crucial syllables, Madame Pomfrey went to a drawer, retrieved a syringe, tapped it, took Malfoy's arm, and buried the needle's tip in a prominent vein.

Draco Malfoy, the arrogant, the vain, the egocentric, the mighty, collapsed into a chair, shaking and pale, and clung to it as the epinephrine wound its way through his bloodstream.

I found the plastic package crumpled in my hand and carefully opened my fingers, which were clenched around the little bag so hard that my knuckles had gone white. It crinkled, as if glad to be freed from my clutches. I looked at the list of ingredients again, and then I handed it to Madame Pomfrey, who glanced over it and sighed, coming to the same conclusion I had.

"No more soy for Mister Malfoy," she concluded.

The faintest whisper of his voice was audible in reply. "Rhymes," he managed to murmur.

"What?" I said.

"Soy; Malfoy," he repeated, a thin and almost spectral smile twisting the corners of his lips upward. "It rhymes."

I looked at him, but he didn't look back. Instead, he managed to shuffle over to a vacant bed, kick off his shoes, peel back the white sheets, and bury himself between them. Hair that was almost white but for the butter yellow sheen peeked out of the small gap between the sheets and the pillow. Gradually, his breathing smoothed and slowed. Apparently spent by his brief waltz with the Grim Reaper, Malfoy had gone to sleep.

Madame Pomfrey thanked me, and I went down to the Griffyndor common room to dispel the last of the smoke with a few swishes of my wand and return to my homework, attempting to push thoughts of the Hospital Wing from my overburdened mind.

It wasn't long later that I made the mistake of going back.


	4. Rue the Day

_Author's Note: I hope you're having fun with this sucker, 'cause I certainly am._

DRACO

When I opened my eyes, it felt like a very long time had gone by. "By now"s started going through my head, as they often did.

_Eons might have passed by now. Empires might have risen and fallen by now. Aurora—that was the sleeping one's name, wasn't it?—might have yawned her way out of bed and wandered off to find her charming prince._

I looked over. There was a girl sitting in a chair not far away. The rosy pink glow of the sunset painted her skin delicately, like a watercolor, and dark eyes, smoldering like coals from the depth of the shadow, considered the window. I thought giddily that an angel had heard my mumbled, stilted prayers—or perhaps that a demon had finally tallied my list of transgressions and taken the elevator up to collect me. And then the figure turned, and it was Hermione Granger.

What a tremendous disappointment.

I thought she'd immediately start off by calling me on my debt. _"I saved your life, Draco Malfoy, and now you'd better start treating me like a human being, bitch, bitch, bitch, moan, moan, moan."_ I wondered whether I would be able to stifle myself with my pillow.

But, as it turned out, she didn't say any of those things. She said, "Where are your friends?"

I glanced at the window. Six-thirty, maybe. That was probably a little late of an estimate, given the season. "It hasn't been long," I noted.

"A few hours," she countered.

"You think they follow me around like hungry puppies, or what?" I snapped, flicking an eyebrow up derisively.

She shrugged, not deigning to take the bait. "Harry and Ron would be here if it was me."

I smirked. "Harry Potter and Ron Weasley juxtaposed with Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle. That's a pretty shi—" I saw Pomfrey give me a glare. "—poor comparison," I corrected.

Granger shrugged again, as if the topic of our discussion was quite trivial. I couldn't decide whether or not it was.

"I doubt that was what you came here to say, Granger," I remarked, putting into my voice that ooze of acerbic indifference that I'd practiced so often. "So what was it? Come to censure me roundly for my long history of bad behavior? To write a few thousand pages on why I'm a prick and a prat, and sell copies in Diagon Alley? To lay the guilt on thick for all the times I've done you wrong?"

She looked at me for a moment. I had begun to open my mouth to motivate her with a bit more sarcasm when she spoke, refusing to answer my question. Typical Granger—after all that, she wouldn't even offer the common courtesy of a "Yes, Malfoy; you're a total ass" like everybody else.

"You're very smart," she told me instead. "I think you might be pleased with the results if you started acting like it every now and then."

Slowly I raised an eyebrow at her. "That's why you're Gryffindor," I said. When she merely looked confused, I accentuated my habitual drawl and folded my hands behind my head to add to the appearance of utter disinterest. "You'd think you'd be a Ravenclaw, given your absurd study habits, but none of those idiots would have the gall to say something like that to me, knowing the consequences like you do." It was my turn to shrug—just to show how little I cared.

Granger arched an eyebrow. "Are you calling me brave?" she asked.

"No," I replied equably. "I'm calling you stupid."

Granger opened her mouth to protest, but Pomfrey was faster with a snippy and borderline-incensed "Mister _Malfoy_!"

Not to be outdone, Granger stood abruptly. "Well, Malfoy," she concluded, "that's about as much of you as I can take for today. Good luck with those—" She placed a sneering emphasis on the next word. "—_friends_ of yours."

I smiled—or, rather, smirked—at her kindly. "Good luck getting that life," I responded.

She slammed the door on her way out.

I let Pomfrey glare at me for a minute or two to give Granger time to leave before I got out of bed and stretched. "Think I'm cured," I announced.

The hundred and twenty seconds that had passed had not inclined Pomfrey to like me any better. "If there's any other problems, come back," she told me, all business and curt dismissal.

I could have said "Yes, ma'am" like a good boy, but I decided against it. Good boy was so_ boring_.

Speaking of not being a good boy, later that night, the solemn moon and the few wispy clouds clinging to its glowing coattails bore witness to me standing alone outside the school, looking down at the lake and reflecting upon the orange embers at the end of my cigarette. There was silence for awhile, kind, charitable silence but for the breath of the wind that played with my hair and my cloak, and then there were footsteps.

Expecting the worst, I threw the cigarette to the ground and put my shoe over it, hopefully crushing the end out, and put my hands in my pocket, arranging an innocent expression on my face. I didn't turn around sharply, as one might expect, because that would look far too suspicious.

My caution was vindicated by the identity of my visitor—Professor McGonagall.

"Mister Malfoy?" she prompted.

"Professor," I returned, evading the unspoken question.

"It's late," she declared then, as if I hadn't known. The only way to be _alone_ in this place was to go outside at an unpalatable hour of the deepening evening. "It would be my advice to you to go back to your dormitory."

'_It would be my advice to you to be a whiny bitch good boy like all the rest of them, Mister Malfoy,'_ I mocked in my mind.

Despite my relegating the words to within my brain, she looked suspicious. Perhaps she'd seen the smoke.

"What have you been doing out here, Mister Malfoy?" she inquired next.

I shrugged and attempted to continue looking immaculately innocent. "It's nice out here at night," I said.

She continued to consider me shrewdly. "It would put my mind at rest if you'd try to stay inside," she informed me.

_It'd put _my_ mind at rest if you stopped telling me what to do, ya fuckin' hag,_ I thought vindictively.

Outwardly, I shrugged again. "All right," I conceded. I turned on the heel that concealed the cigarette butt, hoping to hide it more completely in the grass, and then strolled off towards the castle entrance. There was nothing McGonagall could do. She had suspicions, perhaps, but no proof, and without proof, there could be no detentions, no reprimands, and no arbitrary points taken from Slytherin—not that those mattered anymore, since Harry "The Demigod" Potter had arrived at Hogwarts and started sweeping the annual competition every year with an act of well-timed heroism.

The bastard.

I wandered awhile before heading back to the dorm, where I skirted around the edges of the drunken party working its way up to a full-fledged ruckus and went up to my room, where Crabbe and Goyle were involved in a nail-biter of a round of their favorite game—marbles. Sophisticated, to say the least. For my part, I tossed myself down on my bed and grudgingly did some homework, fuming a little every time I thought about what Granger had said—_"You're very smart. You might act like it."_ Presumptuous bitch.

I put my hand on auto-pilot, and as it wrote about one sort of Transfiguration or another, I tried to think of a way to grind Granger's smirking, holier-than-thou face into the dust—figuratively speaking, at least at this juncture. "Mudblood" seemed to be losing some of its power. I considered some alternatives. _Her-my-GOD-what-is-that-THING-o-ne_ was unwieldy to say the least. _Hermionit Crab_? Didn't cut it._ Mangy Granger_ had some promise, but it was a little childish. _Deranged Granger_ followed much in the same pattern. No, that wasn't enough. For her, for that self-proclaimed pinnacle of wit and worldliness and wisdom, I had to come up with something truly and indisputably brilliant. It was a challenge—bringing her down was a challenge; _she_ was a challenge. And anyone who had rested a mere moment in my proximity knew exactly how I felt about challenges.

I was going to destroy her. Maybe when she screamed, maybe when she howled, maybe when she sobbed, maybe when she cried for mercy on her knees, her hands clasped as in prayer, the tears running down her face, I would yield. Maybe. Or maybe I would crush her under my foot like that cigarette, until the individual grains of dirt were buried indelibly in her pale, fragile skin.

There was a mirror in our room, and around the grimy coat hung from a corner of it, draping over a good third of the glass, I saw my reflection, shadowed almost gracefully by the indigo bruises that Hermione Granger, know-it-all extraordinaire, had slapped on me like an award. I saw my face darken around the contusions—figuratively this time. I was going to have the last word here, as I always did. Hermione Granger was going to bleed for those bruises. She didn't know it yet, but she would, soon. Soon enough. I could wait.

There was no question of if, but when. When, and how—how to drown that stupid, ugly, uppity, self-important Mudblood in her own complacence; how to hold her head under the surface of it until her lungs filled and the feeble struggling stopped.

And then I thought of the rosy glow of twilight on her face, and I knew.

Crabbe and Goyle looked up sharply as I tossed my Transfiguration book aside and started scribbling madly, trying to transcribe my ideas as fast as they came, like bailing water out of a sinking rowboat. When I was finished, I had an entire piece of parchment blanketed in untidy notes outlining my newest plan. It would have taken a real moron to fuck this one up. It was virtually foolproof. And damn, would it be good.

Hermione Granger, queen of the library, teachers' favorite, with that track record clean and slick as a sheet of ice, was going to rue the day that she'd been born.


	5. The Third Mistake

_Author's Note: Hey, you know what would be really funny? If somebody wrote an HP fic and called the Author's Note an "Auror's Note"!_

…

_Okay, not that funny._

_There is one thing worse than bad jokes: AP tests. And that's what this week is going to be about, my dear friends. Ergo Draco's next chance to conduct himself abominably probably won't be for awhile. Blame CollegeBoard._

HERMIONE

I didn't tell Harry and Ron about Malfoy when they came back for a series of reasons. First of all, they were tired, sweaty, and irritable after what had apparently been a less-than-stellar Quidditch practice. Second, I didn't think that it was any of their business what allergies plagued a surprisingly susceptible Slytherin. And thirdly, they would have made a joke out of it—out of his near-death experience—and would have berated me for helping him. As far as I was concerned, he was conceited and elitist, yes, but those flaws didn't merit a death sentence by any means. I couldn't think of anyone who deserved to _die_ for the things he'd said and done.

Well, there was Voldemort, I guess.

All the same, I didn't so much as allude to Draco Malfoy.

"What've you been up to?" Ron inquired grudgingly as he and Harry trudged into the common room, as if he thought it was his duty to ask even though he didn't really care.

I shrugged and smiled in a way that I hoped seemed blithe and innocent. "Homework," I answered.

The two of them blinked at me.

"Bookworm," Ron remarked, dismissing my attention to study as a futile pastime—typical Ron, of course.

I raised my shoulders again briefly and then moved on. "Well, that's about all I've got to do for tonight anyway." The lie came smoothly as I collected my things and started for the stairs. "Sleep well." I didn't give them time to call me back. Fortunately, their recent exertion had effectively deprived them of the energy that would have been necessary to puzzle me out, and they let it go.

Most of the next day passed calmly, probably because we didn't have any classes with the Slytherins. Though I did get into a pretty heated argument during lunch—about a spell, and with a Ravenclaw girl. I was right, as it turned out, which was good, because I wasn't really allowed to be wrong.

It was just after that, as I looked up from my victory and glanced around to see who my supporters were and whether they were rejoicing appropriately, that I noticed one pair of eyes on me that were uncharacteristically soft and unassuming. Thinly, but without the trademark hint of malice, Draco Malfoy smiled. I had time only to blink at him before he returned his full attention to his meal, leaving me to wonder hesitantly if I'd fabricated the whole thing in my mind. But why would I imagine something like that? Surely I didn't care—didn't care about Draco Malfoy, didn't care about his interest, didn't care about the attention. Besides, the remotest sign of _his_ interest probably indicated nothing more and nothing less than a plan for revenge. I should be wary, not excited.

I'd like to think that I couldn't help myself, but that might very well be a lie, and we all know that lying to yourself is "categorically detrimental to your psychological well-being."

_Psychology and You_, if you were wondering.

In the early hours of that afternoon, the ample traffic in the Gryffindor common room drove me to the library (no pun intended). There, in my fragile sanctum, glares from Pince kept the gigglers and the gossips in check. And people wondered why I liked the library so much. Had they ever considered the fact that it was the only place on campus boasting both books and silence?

As I worked on one of my longer assignments for the evening, I can say without (much) vanity that I epitomized the kind of intense focus that teachers loved and students hated—writing briskly but neatly, cross-referencing every statement with a few reliable sources, my forehead furrowed, my hair tied back to keep it out of the ink, the tip of my tongue caught between my teeth. Other kids despised that sort of a display, because they weren't willing to put in the effort required to duplicate it. Professors cherished it like a family heirloom, loving it all the more because it was so rare. I was the supreme prizewinner of a rare breed: students who put schoolwork before Quidditch, before Hogsmeade, and before indulging in absurd romantic intrigues with fellow slackers.

But it is true that, in a car or on a bike or on a pair of ice skates, the faster you go, the worse it's going to hurt when you fall. The road was slippery, the sidewalk was uneven, and the ice was thin, but I was cocky, and I didn't take the time to evaluate my surroundings. That omission was going to cost me, and it was going to cost me big.

When someone sat down in the chair across from me and put his feet up on the table, I assumed that it was Harry, or, more likely given the way in which my visitor had casually desecrated the library's sanctity, Ron. That was the first of my mistakes.

It was a mistake because I didn't look up for a little while, and when I did, my visitor was Draco Malfoy.

I looked at him, hearing the ink fall from my suspended pen and land on my paper—_drip…drip…drip_. He looked back. After a moment, he smirked.

"Granger," he greeted me, neutrally enough.

"Malfoy," I responded slowly. I stuck the pen back in the ink bottle.

"I think we need to have a heart-to-heart," Malfoy announced.

"You've developed a heart, then?" burst out of my mouth without my approval.

I saw a flash of anger in his light, light eyes, eyes that hinted of a midwinter moon in a frozen sky, eyes like ice wreathed in silver, but then he smiled. It looked like it might have taken some effort to produce that smile, but it was the apparent difficulty that made the expression almost…noble.

Before I could shudder at the very prospect of Draco Malfoy acting with some semblance of grace, he spoke again.

"I'm not here to fight with you, Granger," he said calmly, a smirk tugging at his lips again.

I watched him carefully, but not carefully enough. "Then what do you want?" I asked. Letting him continue—that was my second mistake.

With earnest interest tempered by his indomitable calm, he leaned forward. "I want us to understand each other," he told me. "I want to be on even footing for once. I want us to put our weapons away; I want us to take our teeth out of each other's throats. I want peace for once. I want a truce—a cease-fire. I want to be able to sit in Potions and not have to consider the possibility that there'll be a knife in my back the next second." He sat back and looked at me discerningly. "Does that sound feasible?" he prompted.

A man that could use "feasible" in a sentence correctly merited an answer.

"That sounds perfectly feasible," I said. I wasn't sure if it was true.

He put his hand out to shake, and when I took it, he presented me with a small gift in return: a little smile. Not a smirk, not a grin, not a grimace; no whiff of supercilious smugness rising from it like the fumes from a fetid corpse; no sardonic twist to his lips or acrimonious arch to his eyebrow. It was the smile of a smaller boy, an innocent boy, a naïve boy, a boy beleaguered on all sides by an unsympathetic and inimical world. It was the smile of a boy who could see the tongues of flame licking their way towards his stronghold, which, for all its height and grandeur, was very, very flammable.

When you read as much as I do, it comes as little surprise when you read into things. I read a lot into that little smile, and what I perused there convinced me that there was more to Draco Malfoy than I had seen before. That little smile promised me that he had more than two dimensions, that he was a genuine human being, that he nurtured his hopes and his dreams and his fears in the solitary dark of the night like everybody else, and that he was far more vulnerable than he was willing to admit.

I saw all those things, and then I released his hand, but he wasn't finished.

"I don't want to blame anyone," he said, quietly now, folding his arms and meeting my eyes, "but we've done a lot of stupid things—both of us have. We've treated each other like children, like jealous children, and that's inexcusable. We're not fighting for the same toys, are we? Not seeking the same affections? So why bicker? Why spit in each other's faces and blacken each other's eyes?" Ever so slightly he shook his head, and white-blond hair fluttered like a dove's feathers and then settled. "What we've been doing, the way we've been acting, is destructive and, worse, pointless. I say we put an end to it." His piercing eyes found mine and burrowed into my pupils, rooting around in the dregs for something of worth. I was suddenly desperate to give it to him.

"I couldn't agree more," I responded.

I had always unhappily conceded, inwardly at least, that Draco Malfoy was an attractive individual. Now, true to my belief that circumstances can alter perceptions, he was better-looking than ever. There was a rakish tilt to his brief grin, and the deliberate, definite lines of his face, cut quickly and confidently from pale, rich marble, looked more regal than snobbish.

"Do you want to go for a walk?" he asked me. With a nod to the books I had open on the table, he added, "I understand if you're busy."

With incredible speed and dexterity, especially for someone with a bit of a tendency to trip over thresholds and run into poles, I slammed all my books shut and jammed them into my bag. "I'm not," I declared. "Where would you like to go?"

He shrugged. "Around."

_Around_ ended up entailing a quick exit from the castle, where prying eyes might seek us out and stare at us in utter disbelief, and a quick escape down to the lake, of which we began to stroll the perimeter idly. The insistent breeze squirming through the trees and slapping at the water wreaked havoc on my hair, which was soon out of its restraints and free to whip into Malfoy's face as much as it pleased. To my surprise, instead of shoving me into the frigid water to die when this event occurred, Malfoy laughed—if more dryly than enthusiastically.

Some time between the first and the second circuit of the lake, we started talking, and it was then that the palisades really came down between us. We dismantled them personally, piece by piece, subject by subject, and, without the obstruction, we had a clearer view of each other than I ever would have thought possible.

"I feel like I have to prove myself," I said dully. "I mean, if everybody's out there shouting, 'Mudblood, Mudblood,' I've almost got an _obligation_ to show them that I can do as well and better than any wizard else. You know what I mean?"

Malfoy nodded slowly, his eyes on the grass beneath his feet. "And, on the flip-side of that," he responded in a low voice, "if my father's not going to think I'm a disgrace to the entire extended family, I've got to prove that I can do even better than you." He glanced up and gave me a glimpse of an ironic smile. "Which I can't."

"At least you have an ounce of common sense to go with your good grades," I replied with a thin smile of my own. "If there was an exam for practical intelligence, I'd fail it."

"Granger," he said, "I don't think you're physically capable of failing an exam."

"It would be a monumental first," I noted, "but it would happen."

He smirked.

As we wandered back into the castle to the silent serenade of the sunset, I reflected that things were going remarkably well. Illogically well. Impossibly well.

We both paused, rather reluctantly it seemed, at the diverging corridor where we had to part ways.

"Well," I attempted awkwardly, "I…guess I'll see you in Potions tomorrow."

When he nodded, I started to go, but he called me back.

"Granger," he said.

I turned, and he put a hand on my shoulder, pulled me towards him, and kissed me.

I didn't know much about kisses, but Draco Malfoy's was wonderful. I could have drowned in it and died happy. It was everything I'd hoped for and a thousand things I'd never dreamed of.

But it didn't last long, because he pulled away and, looking horrified and disgusted with himself, bolted down the hallway without giving me time to call after him.

I stood blinking for a moment, and then I turned and stumbled dazedly back to my dorm.

The third mistake that I made that afternoon was falling in love with Draco Malfoy.


	6. Just a Tad

_Author's Note: I deeply regret to report that Black Mirror will be very disappointed. Thank you for the reviews, you beautiful paradigms of human goodness!_

_The good news: I will never take an AP test again. The bad news: I have the worst cold since… the last cold hell-bent on turning my brain into cotton, one fiber at a time._

DRACO

I didn't explain to my illustrious roommates why, at approximately seven o'clock on a Wednesday evening, I exploded into the dorm, careened up the stairs, and commenced furiously brushing my teeth, an activity that I followed with the severe scouring of my face with a washcloth and a lot of spitting into the sink, punctuated by bouts of scrubbing my hands under the faucet. They wouldn't have grasped the nuances of my design, and, furthermore, I didn't trust them to keep their fat mouths shut about it. Presuming that I told them and they managed to comprehend, odds were that they would be inclined to chortle, snigger, and otherwise express their malevolent glee at the most inopportune moments, and they would therein expose me. That was a risk I was not willing to take—not now, when the chips were down and the bets were in, and all that remained was to wait and see what card came up next.

There was little doubt in my mind that I was ahead at the moment—that I was winning by a landslide, to be more precise. But if I let my guard down now, there was still time to lose everything. No, better to watch, to wait, to judge, and to strike again, harder and faster.

The plan was extraordinarily simple, a trivial teenager's ploy, used and reused: I was going to make Hermione Granger fall madly in love with me, and then I was going to humiliate her in front of the entire school—and the entire wizarding community, if I could manage it. It was exceedingly uncomplicated, and that was why it was going to work. That, and the fact that Granger, isolated by her vast intelligence, lonely at the snowy summit of brilliance, casting a desperate glance below to seek some kind soul to act as her anchor, was extremely vulnerable.

And extremely stupid, and extremely sentimental.

Maybe this was _too_ easy.

The next morning, I strolled into Potions a few seconds shy of late—though today, I didn't _stroll_ so much as_ stumble_, the picture of ambivalent agony, lavender circles under my eyes to match the violet bruises on my cheeks; hair arranged in "haphazard disarray;" everything ostensibly unsettled and uncomfortable. I was Rodin's _Thinker_ with heavy undercurrents of _Pietà_ anguish. I slumped in my desk and made it absolutely clear that I resolutely _refused_ to look at the dear, sweet Mudblood sitting not far away, for surely my tortured heart would break in two. Surely the purgatory prison to which the tyrant Love had condemned me was already too much. Surely no one could ask any more of this hapless, helpless, hopeless soul!

My serpentine compatriots were even more confused than usual. Consequently, I ignored them. As far as everything that mattered was concerned, they were little more than pawns on this grandiose chessboard. I liked to consider myself more of a knight—imposing enough on the superficial level, but with the real power in the swift and unexpected attacks.

A bit conceited of an analysis, perhaps. I never claimed humility among my sparing virtues. That, however, was one thing that I did admire in myself—my brutal honesty. I was willing to say things from which legions of others shied away—and I was willing to express them concisely, in the most appropriate terms available, terms that "civilized" folk frowned upon. Terms like _Mudblood_.

We all knew it was the right word for it—short, accurate, and precise. Why equivocate? They just weren't the same stock as the rest of us. It was an established fact. What did we stand to gain by sugarcoating the reality?

Call it bigotry if you want. I've heard it all before.

As the materials for the lesson were distributed, everything seemed comfortingly normal. Snape looked as sour as if he had recently drunk something out of Neville Longbottom's misguided cauldron; Longbottom himself was staring morosely at the instructions laid out before him; Blaise Zabini was trying to make eye contact with me so that he wouldn't get stuck with a partner who was utterly inept; Potter and his red-headed tumor—pardon me, _friend_—were conspiring, possibly planning their next act of harrowing heroism; and Granger was reviewing the neat set of notes she'd written out to help her perfect today's potion. She sensed my eyes on her and started to look up and meet them. I chose that opportunity to drop my gaze demurely, slowly enough that she'd see me do it, and turned to Blaise.

The coyness was then very abruptly decapitated, because I had no further use for it.

"You going to fuck it up this time?" I asked him.

He snorted. "_You_ fucked it up last time," he responded.

I didn't deign to argue with him. We both knew who had fucked it up and who hadn't.

We also both knew, and hour and a half later, to whose credit it stood that our project was bubbling tranquilly, releasing a thin, sweet-smelling steam that curled its way upward towards the arching ceiling of the dungeon. Blaise could not bring himself to feel a flush of victory, however, because General Mudblood Granger, with Lieutenant Idiot Longbottom at her side, had managed to whip up her own batch of sickening orange syrup first.

The bitch.

Blaise continued to mutter about the indignity of it all as we sat back and twiddled our thumbs until the remaining fifteen minutes of class wore out. I considered maneuvering some way to necessitate my partnering up with Granger next time in the interest of my ultimate goal, but despite all the progress I could make with hesitant smiles and kind words in that setting, it was too risky and too obvious. There were other ways to get her undivided attention and appeal to the hormone-ridden, lonely little girl that was Hermione Granger. I wasn't worried. I had time.

That evening, I fortified myself with a few cancer sticks and then tracked her down in the library again. "Tracked her down" is very appropriate terminology. This arrangement was predatory in the profoundest sense.

She looked up at me and smiled, and I knew that I had her in range of my teeth. I used them to smile back—for the moment. "Walk with me?" I asked.

She did, and we sat on the hill overlooking the lake and let the wind try to scalp us. As we perched there in pensive silence, I considered my hands as if they were the most important thing I'd ever seen.

"This is hard," I mumbled, knowing she'd perceive the object of my hanging 'this.' "I mean…I'm the single heir to one of the most famous wizarding families in the history of the world, and you're…" I cut myself off and put on my Miserable Face. It was one of my best faces.

"A Mudblood?" Granger supplied airily.

The surprise with which I looked up was genuine, unlike the "misery" before it. The calm with which she was employing the word—that spoke volumes of its impotence. Maybe I had overused it a little. Just a tad.

"Yeah, I guess," I muttered, lowering my eyes again.

'_Yeah, I guess,' my ass,_ I thought vindictively. _There's no _guessing_ here. She'd a Mudblood, no two ways about it, and that is an absolutely disgusting thing to be. Don't let her touch you, or you'll never be able to get it off._

Granger watched the wind rip leaves off of the trees that dared poke their heads up into the horizon. "Muggle things aren't as bad as you seem to think they are," she declared quietly. "They've got movie theaters and microwaves, and ballpoint pens and fluorescent lights, and automated alarm systems and iris scanners." She paused, and I wavered over what I should conclude about the fact that she referred to Muggles as _they_. I didn't have long to mull over it before she concluded, "And cigarettes."

My head jerked up sharply again, and too late I realized how stupid and obvious the gesture was. Instead of crowing over her victory, Hermione Granger offered no more and no less than a thin, ironic smile that was almost sad.

"You smell like tobacco," she informed me. "And you go dashing out of class and disappear for awhile, entirely discomfited, and then you're cool and collected when you come back. How many today? Three? Four? A pack?"

I transferred my gaze to the ground just in time, such that I glared at the grass and not at her—much as I would have reveled in it. "I don't know what you're talking about," I announced, as idiotic as it sounded even to my own ears.

"There are Muggle ways to stop, too," she added. "Patches and pills and so on."

"I don't have a _problem_, all _right_?" I couldn't help the sneer. It was so natural. It was _me_.

She shrugged. "De Nile is more than just a river in Egypt."

The statement was absurdly stupid to begin with, and, as if that wasn't enough, it came out of the faultlessly intelligent, endlessly mature Hermione Granger's notoriously articulate mouth. I couldn't help myself. I laughed—hard.

Apparently the conversation was over, because she stood up and shook out her robes. I took to my feet as well, primarily because I despised the very idea of being at a disadvantage. I expected Granger to take that opportunity to try to kiss me or something, but she didn't. Maybe it was my newfound tobacco aura. That could be a pretty good warding charm, come to think of it.

Instead, she patted me on the arm, bid me goodnight, and walked off with her head held high and her ridiculous hair streaming away as if it wanted to follow the wind to the ends of the earth.

Perhaps, I thought as I trudged my way back to the dorm, dodging teachers and tattletales alike as I went, this endeavor would be a little harder than I thought.

Only a little. Just a tad.


	7. Red and Green

_Author's Note: I haven't died, though it probably seemed like I did. Rather, I have just survived the most insane two weeks of my life. Now I can relax for…two days. Then it gets psychotic again. Hip, hip, huzzah…?_

_Well, for your newest example of my hypocrisy, I always find Quidditch games boring, and now I wrote about one. I'm sorry. I needed events._

HERMIONE

I looked down at my finger and realized that the hangnail I'd been chewing on bemusedly had given way to a respectable gush of blood. Whoops. I retrieved a tissue from my supply and dabbed at it absently. I didn't munch on my cuticles very often; it was an activity I reserved for times of genuine need: final exams, standardized tests, and personal crises. This particular instance fell into the lattermost category.

Draco Malfoy needed help. That much was unequivocally clear. What was just as plain to the perceiving eye was that he wasn't going to get it anywhere else. His "friends," such as they were, didn't seem to like him for anything more than his lofty status, and they were concerned enough with almost failing out of school without having to worry about their ringleader's dirty little secrets. Malfoy wasn't one to go to a teacher, and he and Madame Pomfrey weren't on the best of terms either. The only professor he didn't routinely vilify in the first place was Snape, and the idea of Severus Snape comforting a student in need was ridiculous to the point of being laughable. No, Draco Malfoy had an aura about him, a buffer zone, a layer of empty space around his person, trespassers into which would be shot on sight. He repelled friendship. He rebuffed kindness. He repulsed consolation.

I was all that he had, and he didn't even know it.

Or perhaps he did—subconsciously, even. Perhaps he had stumbled upon the revelation that I, and I alone, it seemed, was willing to look past and through the Slytherin stigma and the deterring demeanor and the haughty hostility. Perhaps he had seen that I would help him if he asked, even in the quietest whisper, for a moment of my time. Perhaps that was why he'd come to me.

But then again, maybe I just wanted to think that I was special. Don't we all?

The next afternoon, as I was strolling towards the Great Hall for dinner—alone; I'd been finishing an assignment and had given Harry and Ron express permission to go on ahead before all the good stuff was taken—Malfoy appeared as if from nowhere, having concealed himself behind some wall or in some doorway and now darting out to materialize beside me as I made my way innocently down the corridor. The trick earned him a melodramatic gasp and a breathless "Don't _do_ that!"

My histrionic reaction earned me a smirk. "Do what, Granger?" he inquired, his drawl even more pronounced than usual.

"You know perfectly well what," I replied primly, playing along.

He grinned. "I'm sure I don't," he responded guilelessly.

We reached the double doors to the Great Hall, doors that were securely shut before us. The passages were empty but for a few second years meandering in our direction—too young to know us by reputation; too far away to see our opposite badges and express their shock.

"I…" Malfoy began hesitantly, stopping a safe distance from the doors. "I…don't think we…should."

I don't know what I was expecting. Indomitable and everlasting love? A vow to disregard the disbelief, overlook the astonishment, and overcome the outrage? His pledge that he wouldn't abandon me for anything—not for status, not for standing, not for any sum of money in the world? What did I think this episode was, a page ripped from a fairy tale? The only thing we had in common with that page was the ragged edges.

"I guess not," I acceded quietly. I was looking at the ground, because I couldn't bear to look into his eyes and see in them that he cared more about what people thought than he cared about me. It was lunacy, and I knew it—to want his affection so badly. He'd given me a taste of it, a sample, and now I felt entitled to a ten-course meal. I wasn't entitled to anything.

He paused, and then he pushed the doors open a little bit and slipped in between them—presumably to join his friends, to laugh raucously with them, to enjoy himself, to act just as unconcerned and boorish as the rest of them. Devil-may-care; Draco didn't.

I turned around and went back to the Gryffindor common room to finish up my homework. Reality had just about killed my appetite.

The next morning was better. A new day, a new chance, a new world of opportunities. I maneuvered my way through my classes with relative ease and avoided looking in the direction of one blond Slytherin lest I get all moping and emotional again. Besides. It was selfish to think about futile teenager "relationship" things when he had a genuine problem.

But it is hard not to be selfish sometimes.

That evening was a Quidditch game, Slytherin versus Gryffindor. Harry and Ron were psyched about it to a degree that was almost ludicrous—mapping out ideal plays, pacing like caged tigers, pitching a metal ball about the size of a fist back and forth as fast as they could and incurring some bruises in the process. When it came time to go down to the field and dress, they'd almost sweated straight through their street-clothes in anticipation.

I wandered down early enough to secure myself a decent seat. I wasn't too big on Quidditch, but it grew on you. Once you were down there, with the announcer shouting at the top of his lungs into the microphone, the stands painted with people dressed in their team's colors, the crowd buzzing and rolling like ocean waves with the excitement its members couldn't contain, the players zipping by at breakneck speed, sometimes inches from your nose—it was hard not to get caught up in it. The enthusiasm was infectious, and staying in your seat when the score was tight and everyone else was up and screaming, their voices rising as one and their arms thrust in the air as if _they_ might make the winning catch, verged on impossible.

I always hoped, privately, that no one would get hurt. Today, that oft-disappointed hope was even more desperate, because I had one more player to worry about. But it looked like this particular game would see even more disappointment than usual. The murderous glares passing between the two teams were visible even from the stands, and there was no shortage of knuckles to be cracked threateningly.

There was always too much testosterone on that field, to be quite honest.

Then the game started, and the crowd produced a roar that could have raised a grand cemetery's load of the dead. The announcer was thundering about this player and that player and this foul and that brilliant pass, and green and red people were flickering around the great field like hummingbirds. The red-haired one was by the goal; he caught the Quaffle deftly to the whooping cheers of the scarlet-clad mass on my side of the stadium. The black-haired Seeker hovered hesitantly above the fray that whirled closer to the ground, coasting around occasionally, as if looking for some object he'd lost. There was a white-blond boy not far away. For a fraction of a second I imagined that he looked right at me, but that was impossible.

I tried to focus on the flurries of motion that occurred in the midst of the main portion of the field, but the two players that interested me most were up above that main portion, watching and waiting, trying to see a little golden ball before the other. They trailed each other carefully, the follower matching the leader's weaving path, their roles changing constantly. I tried to direct my attention momentarily to the primary game. Gryffindor scored. A few minutes later, Slytherin did. They traded off goals, and with each triumphant howl from the green half of the stadium, Ron's face grew a little closer in color to his hair, the insuppressible reddening of his cheeks noticeable even from this distance. Still the Seekers circled like vultures.

Watching Harry, I caught sight of the slightest shift in his body language—his shoulders went a little more rigid, his back went a little straighter. I thought I might have been exaggerating given that he shortly started into the familiar pattern of tailing his opponent cautiously, but then he chose a moment when Malfoy's eyes were elsewhere to peel away and plummet towards the Earth like a falling stone.

I didn't have time to search the air below him for the glint of gold that he saw, and I didn't even have time to look for Malfoy's reaction, which would likely have been a mixture of horror, frustration, and unadulterated anger. There was time only to draw in a breath as Harry sliced through the air towards the unforgiving ground, his hair whipped back, his robes crackling as if imbued with electricity. He passed within feet of my place on the balcony, within sixteen inches of my white knuckles clenched around the guardrail, and I knew, knew, knew that he was going to miss his mark and splatter on the ground like an overripe tomato. Blood everywhere.

Of course, he didn't. That would have been extremely anticlimactic. Instead, he swooped out of his guided free-fall with an aptitude that took my breath away and rose like an ascending angel, a tiny golden sphere with feebly flapping wings clutched in one hand. His grin was like a beacon.

The game ended then, per the rules. The Slytherins went off glumly, muttering sullenly among themselves about cheating, shooting glances portentous of gory death in the direction of the celebrating Gryffindors. A boy with lightning blond hair dressed in green and silver touched down gracefully, slipped off of the field, and disappeared. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I had to go find Draco Malfoy as soon as humanly possible.


	8. Glass in the Sink

_Author's Note: Must…write…more…before…life…gets…crazy…_

_Hope you less-than-three Shakespeare as much as I do._

DRACO

_What a fucking disappointment._

That was what I said. What my dear father was going to say would be worse.

_What a fucking disgrace._

And I was, wasn't I? It was absolutely disgraceful to get wiped off of the field by that self-righteous, sermonizing, goody-two-shoes asshole Harry Potter. Him and his infamous flame-haired cohort. The two of them were a match made in Hell for any respectable wizard in the world—the ultimate foil for the old families, because they had as much a claim to good blood as we did, and they abused it to no end.

That pissed me off. More than anything else in the world, _that_ in _particular_ pissed me off, because there was nothing I could do about it—short maybe of killing them.

I knocked back a shot of vodka and forced my shaking hand to stay still enough to fill the little glass again. It was a small target.

That was an idea. Killing people. It was absurdly easy, really, if you thought about it. Human beings are fragile, fragile things. Slit a throat, smash a skull—simple stuff. And with a wand in your hand, it's almost _too_ easy. The act itself really ought to be more of a challenge, given the consequences.

Given that I was getting a good buzz now, I started to plan my prospective murder. Murders, really—plural. Weasley was going down with Potter. It was the way it should have been. _I think it not meet Marc Antony, so well-beloved of Caesar, should outlive Caesar._

Yes, I'm _that_ kind of drunk.

I would torture Neville for the password to the Gryffindor dormitory, and then I would either scramble his brains or outright kill him. Killing sounded preferable. No witnesses was always a good thing. I would take that password, enter the dorm—if that overweight woman in the portrait even thought to ask, someone would have borrowed a book of mine that I needed—and creep up to the appropriate bedroom. I would open the door quietly and wait for the rustling of limbs against bed-sheets to go completely silent. And then I would approach my victims and, one after the other, I would hit them with an Unforgivable and be done with it.

Or maybe I'd put a bullet in each of their respective foreheads. Seemed like a nice touch, given that the both of them were Muggle-lovers, and that using Muggle means would frame a Mudblood. I nodded to myself. Yes, that sounded good. And it would be infinitely more satisfying to pull a trigger than to wave a wand.

Maybe I'd kill Dean and Seamus, too, just to make sure that there weren't _any_ witnesses. It wasn't likely they'd sleep through the shots, even if I had a silencer. They probably had to die, too. It wasn't a great loss. More Gryffindor scum in the graveyard.

I wondered if Hogwarts had a graveyard. Surely people died here, and the administration covered it up. There had to be suicides, and homicides, and roommate-icides. I mean, honestly.

I downed another dose of vodka and admired the view from the bathroom window, a lovely panorama afforded to me by my improvised upturned-rubbish-bin chair. It was getting dark, and the stars were peeking out of a velvety sky, and the moon was full and crisp and yellow, low and fat on the horizon. It looked like cheese. I could have gone for some cheese with my vodka, but I didn't want to leave to try to find some. Instead I just poured again, spilling a little this time despite my best efforts to steady my hands.

The door opened, and without looking I told the intruder to fuck off. I could hear a little bit of a slur in my own voice, which was a bad sign, but the statement was clear enough. The invader only really needed to hear the tone of it anyway.

"I most certainly will _not_ fuck off," she answered.

Red flags went up rapidly. It was like a bullfight. First of all, Plan A, or the "Mind Your Own Fucking Business" Method, was not working. Second of all, I was in the gentlemen's lavatory, and this voice was distinctly female. Worst yet, it was familiar.

Intoxicated or not, I knew it was Granger.

"Mind your own fucking business," I told her. Uncreative, I know. Cut me some slack. Drunk, remember?

"I'm making this my business," Granger announced, stomping up to me and folding her arms disapprovingly. Where did the girl _get_ these lines?

I shrugged and took my next shot. Fourth? I thought it was. Somewhere in that area. When I lowered the glass, I found that Granger had repossessed my bottle and was making for the sink, presumably to pour its contents down the drain. I managed to find my feet and scramble after her with surprising dexterity given the situation.

"That shit's expensive!" I protested, mostly coherently, as she moved to upend it.

Granger looked at me, her eyebrows drawn together. Concerned or something.

"Draco, this isn't the answer," she said.

The statement gave me an opportunity to snatch the bottle back. It was an opportunity that I took gratefully.

"The whole point of life is finding your own answers," I announced. It didn't sound quite so clichéd at the time, if you were wondering.

She reached for the bottle, and I jerked it away from her.

"You're being in_suff_erably stupid," she snapped.

"Not just stupid," I commented calmly. "In_suff_erably stupid. That's in_cred_ible."

"That's right," she sniffed. Next a plaintive note came into her voice. She was playing all her cards tonight, and trying out all her voices. "You're going to ruin your life this way. Don't be an idiot. Please."

"'O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I,'" I began pleasantly. Told you I was _that_ kind. "'Is it not monstrous that this player here, but in a fiction, in a dream of passion, could force his soul so to his own conceit?'"

Granger frowned. "Don't."

I couldn't remember the next bit, so I skipped ahead. It worked better like that anyway. "'What would he do had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have? He would drown the stage in tears, cleave the general ear—'"

Granger's face darkened. "He certainly wouldn't hide in the bathroom and drink cheap vodka, I'll tell you that."

Being mildly inebriated, I couldn't help but laugh uproariously. "Allow me to assure you," I told her, "that this is very _expensive_ vodka. Draco Malfoy does not drink cheap vodka. Neither does Draco Malfoy smoke cheap cigarettes. And Draco Malfoy most _certainly_ does not explain himself to Mudbloods."

As I reveled in my linguistic genius, tickled especially by my exquisite parallel structure, she caught me off-guard and ripped the bottle out of my fingers, at which point she clutched it close to her chest as if it were a very valuable prize. "Draco," she said patiently, as if she were a tired mother reprimanding an obstinate child, "don't be stupid."

"Sorry," I responded, reaching for the neck of the bottle again, scrabbling for it. "But I am. It's a character trait. These things are permanent, I'm afraid." I missed my target and instead ended up with my fingers tangled in her hair. She tried to yank herself free and in the process captured my hand even more effectively. We struggled a little, pointlessly, a bit of back-and-forth pulling that the both of us knew was entirely useless, and then I looked at her a moment, appraised her value, and made a new drunken decision—one that outdistanced all its predecessors in pure and unadulterated idiocy. "Mudblood," I declared. "'That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.'"

Granger's brow furrowed again, instantaneously, like the folds in a curtain. It was a talent of hers. "_Romeo and Jul_—"

I kissed her.

When I let go and somehow managed to extricate my fingers from their plaited prison, she staggered backwards, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. I didn't have the presence of mind to be insulted just yet.

"Your breath is _noxious_," she sputtered.

Winsomely and, I hoped, winningly, I smiled. "Give me the bottle," I coaxed.

Even after the great sacrifice I had just made to appease her, she refused to yield. I'd thought she was smarter than that. If she'd been anywhere near as brilliant as everyone seemed to think, she would have realized that if she had pretended to be intimidated, I would have left her alone. It was about exerting power; it was about having control over the people I viewed as my inferiors; and if she submitted to my will, just once, that would have been enough, and I would have let her live in peace. How could the premier know-it-all since Rowena Ravenclaw, the greatest mind to be immured within this castle since its foundation, fail to grasp such simple pettiness in another human being?

Or perhaps she did understand it, and that was precisely the reason that she continued to defy me.

For this particular act of defiance, she held the bottle out of my reach and then proceeded to smash it on the edge of the sink. Shards of glass exploded outward like a supernova and soared like falling stars, and a glittering waterfall of vodka coursed down into the bowl of the sink and drizzled tranquilly down the drain.

I stared. Then I cried indignantly, "Hermione _Granger_!"

A small smile toyed with her lips, playfully, and then expanded across them, the corners rising, giving me a hint of the teeth I'd attacked with a wonderfully vindictive spell a few short years ago. "You sound like my mother," she said. "You sound exactly like my mother."

"What's your middle name?" I asked.

"Jane," she answered.

"Hermione Jane _Granger_!" I amended, adding a layer of matronly scolding to my voice.

She laughed. Then she noticed the bleeding cuts on her hand.

"Oh," she said.

"Tell Pomfrey it happened in Potions," I suggested.

"Potions was hours ago," she reminded me.

I considered. "Tell her…he made you do detention."

She looked at me. "Detention?"

I looked back. "Oh, right. Forgot who I was talking to. Never mind."

She paused, contemplating, turning the idea over in her mind. "No," she replied slowly, "that might actually work. I mean, if anyone was going to give me detention, it _would_ be Snape, wouldn't it?"

Had to give her that one.

"Excellent," she decided. She righted the trashcan, placed the broken neck of the bottle in it, started for the door, and then paused, turning to look back at me. "Thank you, Draco," she said.

"Sure," I responded.

It was only after the door had closed behind her that I recalled the glass in the sink. I would have gladly left it there if it hadn't been tangible evidence of my transgression. It figured she hightailed it out of there and landed me with the cleanup.

"Fuckin' Mudblood," I muttered as I picked the glimmering fragments gingerly from the cold gray stone of the sink basin. It was like wending my way through a minefield. Pretty symbolic.

_And here's Draco Malfoy, who doesn't drink cheap vodka and doesn't explain himself to Mudbloods, cleaning up the sink,_ I narrated in my head. _Isn't that a disgrace?_

I pricked myself on a jagged edge and swore under my breath.

_You're damn right it is,_ I answered grimly.


	9. War and Peace

_Author's Note: Apologies for the massive delay. Still don't know where I'm going with this story._

HERMIONE

He needed help. He needed serious help, or he was going to destroy himself.

It was very sad, really, that people like that, people who have been handed one delicacy of an opportunity after another on a series of sterling silver platters, were willing to throw it all away. It was profligate, it was disheartening, and it was sad. Draco Malfoy had everything a child could ever want. He was entitled to more in his adolescence than most people could hope to see in their entire lives. He had every chance, every privilege, every opportunity, and he wanted to drink and smoke and kill his organs one by one, substance by substance.

There weren't many times in my life when I was at a total loss. I was no stranger to confusion, to disorientation, to bewilderment, but—it sounds conceited, but truth shouldn't be equated with presumption—I wasn't utterly adrift very often.

Well, right about now, I was in the middle of the Atlantic in a leaky rowboat, and the oars had somehow disappeared. Oh, and the sharks were circling ominously, and I'd cut my hand on his stupid vodka bottle.

Struggling a little, not being a particularly adroit individual, I wrapped a long strip of gauze around the worst of the lacerations on my hand. Fortunately, the afflicted body part was my left hand, which had been closer to the sink and had been commissioned to do the bottle-smashing, and no one would be greatly surprised if I wore a glove against the bitter cold that had set in. Admittedly, a single glove was a bit unusual. It would make me very unluckily reminiscent of Michael Jackson, that American pop star of days past—a fading star now. An especially grotesque sideshow to the blinding coruscation of the gaudy center stage, the new culture, the ever-shifting ocean of it; waves of purses and skirts and logos and photographs of people whose private scandals were the public's secret joys.

My mother always told me I read too much.

People who knew me would probably assume that I'd been one of those fantastically brilliant children who starts to read at two or three and gobbles down _War and Peace_ by the fourth grade. I didn't do anything like that. I was very normal. I went to the park, and the swings were my favorite. I jogged my feet impatiently while my mother tied my shoes, which made it take even longer, and eventually I became so frustrated that I made her teach me how to do it. I wore colors brighter than the sunshine that brought me out of doors like a dog to a whistle, because they made me happy and they were sprightly against the scenery, which was often a dull gray. I was quite average, and I learned to read with all the other average children, and it was only then that things changed.

I remember staggering through the first book I read to my mother, the first book I read aloud entirely independently. In it, a lonely frog went looking for a playmate and encountered a vast variety of different animals, but each one gave an excuse and sent him away. The cat had to warm the step; the dog had to watch the yard; the chickens were busy searching the ground for leftover corn; the horse was inspecting the grass. The frog grew sadder and sadder, and he settled down at the edge of the yard and cried little frog tears. That was what the story called them: "little frog tears." (The word _tears_ was hard, because it was exactly the same as the word _tears_, like to rip something.) Then all the other animals felt sorry for the frog, and wished they hadn't said those things, and they all went and played together. And even then, as I closed the back cover and placed a small hand on the publishing company emblem that resided there proudly, I knew that this was something special. Something useful. Something powerful. And it filled me with reverence and awe, that little marks on a page could become vivid images in a mind, and I knew that those marks possessed an infinite and untold strength.

So I read. I read everything I could find.

I did not read _War and Peace_ by the fourth grade. In fact, I have still not read _War and Peace_. But I read just about everything else I could find in libraries and bookshelves and haphazard stacks at school and around the town and within my own house, and I ceased to be a "normal child." I didn't want to go to the park. I didn't want to play on the swings. I didn't want dolls or teddy bears or toys or even other children; I wanted books. Non-fiction, fiction, bizarre conglomerations of the two—I read them all, and I read them always. I learned things, lots of things, and I discovered that if I tried to remember those things, I could recall them later. I corrected my parents. I corrected other children. Sometimes I corrected teachers. My parents bore it, my classmates despised it, and my teachers looked on in disbelief. I didn't see what was so strange. It was all in the books. It was right there, if they cared to look.

Reading transformed my intelligence into arrogance, the cruelest kind of alchemy, and the resulting enmity of my peers sent me seeking solace in my reading. It was a cycle—a serpent that devoured its own tail, ceaselessly, until the end of time.

By the time I had reached the age of eleven, I had realized why I had no friends outside of the pages. Firmly I resolved to turn over a new leaf and desist displaying my hard-earned knowledge. I didn't want to be alone anymore.

Then I got a letter that began, _Dear Ms. Granger, We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry._

The first thing I asked was what a Hogwart was. The second thing I asked was where I could find a book about it.

I had tried not to be a know-it-all, when I got to this Hogwarts place. I had tried very hard, and I had been very scared—scared of the people, of the objects, of the strange books and strange ideas and strange abilities I kept unearthing, abilities I wouldn't have dreamed of having. But I had been a know-it-all anyway, because it was what and who I was.

I had thought for sure I was going to be a Ravenclaw—for _sure_. I've never exactly figured out why I wasn't. That was another of the many, many things that unsettled me deeply in the first few weeks. It took a good while for those things to settle.

And now Draco Malfoy had decided to shake the snow-globe again. How terribly rude of him.

As far as I knew, Hogwarts did not have a school counselor. Perhaps, if one was as favored as Harry, one might seek Dumbledore. But I didn't think Dumbledore would want to help Malfoy. I didn't think anybody would. As just as Dumbledore tried to be, no one really liked Malfoy. I didn't even think Snape _really_ liked him, so much as he liked his father's favor and galling Harry. Cigarettes and alcohol were Draco Malfoy's most reliable friends and his only advisors.

Harry and Ron were begging for my help with the homework they'd been putting off for a good portion of eternity, so I couldn't go looking for Malfoy just yet. What, I wondered as I made sure Ron wasn't copying, would I do if I found him, anyway? Rap him on the wrist with a ruler? Shake my finger in his face and tell him I was very disappointed? What could you _say_ in the face of deliberate self-destruction?

By the time Harry and Ron went to bed muttering about the Transfiguration essay they'd just completed, I had realized that it was time to do something truly drastic.

That was okay. When you hung out with Harry Potter, you got used to drastic.

When everyone had left the common room and gone to bed, I took a pinch from my supply of Floo Powder, swallowed my last inhibitions, prayed that no one from the Floo Network Authority would be listening, tossed the dust into the flames in the fireplace, said the words, closed my eyes, and thrust my head in.

I opened my eyes again, and a sumptuous office came into focus. The perspective was a little odd—a little low. Of course it was; I was basically on the floor. A cursory survey of the room brought the red-cushioned chair into sight, and there he sat, with his long, pale fingers set in a delicate steeple, one leg crossed over the other at the knee, the light of the fire glinting maliciously off of the flawless sheen of his shiny black shoes. His eyes were hard, like clouded diamonds, and the only movement visible in this statue of a god was when the left edge of his lips curled slightly with evident distaste. He looked at me as though I was the festering, molding severed hand of a corpse he'd buried in the backyard, and a flea-ridden dog had dragged me in and left me there on the floor, shrouded in dirt.

Lucius Malfoy's voice was like the knife with which he probably wanted to slit my throat for desecrating so much as his fireplace. "What do you want?" he inquired coldly.

"It's about your son," I told him, trying to keep my voice level. Sounding collected was like guiding that leaky rowboat through the storm of the century, and I succeeded about as well.

A bit of hair the color of a dead man's skin slid as Lucius Malfoy shifted almost imperceptibly in his chair. "What about him?"

"He needs help," I said, the words jostling and tripping over each other as they stampeded out of my mouth. "I thought you might…want to do something. He's—he's doing things I'm sure you wouldn't approve of." I winced inwardly at that—ending a sentence with a preposition in front of someone I was attempting to impress with my vast intelligence. Not that there was any hope after stammering like I had, anyway.

Lucius Malfoy's pale face darkened, and the emerald flame cast an eerie light. The shadows flickered around his remorselessly sharp features, and everything was bathed in that supernatural green. He looked like he was underwater—or dead.

"So you presume first that you know something about me and second that you have some insight on how I should raise my son," he remarked then, in a voice that was softer, icier, and more stifling than a snowdrift blocking your only exit and holding it fast. A single pale eyebrow rose slowly, as if his skepticism was an afterthought. "I would advise you," Lucius Malfoy said quietly, "to get out of my house before you immensely regret your coming."

I decided that he was the most terrifying person I had ever met. But that didn't change the fact that he wasn't listening to me.

"You don't even care what it is?" I demanded, galvanized by my frustration with him. "I go through all of this to tell you that your only son is in trouble, and you don't even _care_? You're just going to send me away and _forget about it_?"

With a languid caution that was irritating and a bored disinterest that actively burned, he plucked some fleck of something, real or imaginary, off of the arm of his coat with spider-leg fingers. "I believe," he commented calmly, "that I was grievously misinformed when I was told that you were the most intelligent child at that wretched school." When he raised his ash-colored eyes, tinted that same sepulchral green, to my face, they were merciless. "Go home, girl," he said. "This isn't a place for you."

I wanted to flip him off, but I didn't have fingers. Instead I withdrew angrily from the fireplace, tried to swipe the worst of the ash from my hair, and sat on the carpet by the cheerful, perfectly ordinary flames, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do next.


	10. Honestly

_Author's Note: Mmm… Violence…_

_Just remember, children: F-bombs make the world go 'round._

DRACO

Blaise Zabini is a stupid asshole.

"Holy Jesus Christ!" he exclaimed, in that stupid asshole way he had.

"It's kind of the point of Jesus that he's holy," I noted. "That's redundant."

"You're a fucking idiot!" he continued, as if I hadn't made a very valid point.

I sighed. It's so hard to reason with stupid assholes.

"What?" he demanded. "_What_?"

"You're a stupid asshole, Blaise," I explained patiently.

"No, _you're_ a stupid asshole, Draco fucking Malfoy. You fucking _puked_ in the fucking _trashcan_!"

He had a point. But that didn't alleviate the grievous offense.

"'Come not within the measure of my wrath,'" I warned him halfheartedly.

Cracking an eye open revealed that, as expected, he was staring at me dumbly.

"Valentine. _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_," I told him.

"So now you're a stupid _crazy_ asshole," he muttered.

"Real mature," I shot back. "At least I'm not a stupid _illiterate_ asshole like you."

Crabbe and Goyle wandered in and paused as one.

"What's going on?" Crabbe inquired.

"Smells like shit in here," Goyle commented.

Actually, it smelled like puke. The unbelievable stupidity of some people. Honestly.

As any fool could have predicted, even Blaise Zabini, I had a hellacious hangover the next morning. I drank some orange juice, gritted my teeth, and bore it. I wouldn't give Blaise the satisfaction of hearing me complain—not after the bullshit homilies he'd tried to give me the night before, all that crap about ruining my life and "squandering" shit… Either he'd been reading a self-help book for alcoholics, or he'd been talking to Hermione Granger. Whatever the case, he was the one who needed "a brain and an attitude adjustment, in that order"—a direct quote.

_Honestly_.

The owls came, in a mad whirlwind of feathers, a veritable vortex of wings and claws ushered in by a screeching and a fluttering. It was as if the world outside had exhaled into the windows of the Great Hall, birds tumbling like beads of moisture in the gust of foreign air.

I always kind of wanted to put my hands over my food, in case one of those stupid birds decided to take a shit in flight. Invariably I refrained, because if owl shit ended up in my food, once I got over the utter disgust, I'd have a great excuse to make a big, melodramatic fuss, and my father would write a letter to the Ministry so scathing as to strip the skin from its readers. It'd be glorious.

Let 'em shit. I'd show 'em.

I was reveling in the deeply pleasing thought of Dumbledore's wrinkly skin melting off of his face as he scanned my father's tirade when a regal owl sat its regal owl ass down on my empty plate. I turned its head about a hundred degrees around to glare at me with unsettling yellow eyes like candles lit in the dark.

For a minute I just glared back. My orange juice was going to taste like feathers and dust now, purely as a psychological thing. Having a filthy animal so close to my food just ruined the whole experience of eating.

After trading pointless angry stares with the insensible creature for a little while, I buckled down to untie and remove the small scroll attached to its scaly leg. With all the dignity of a king the thing ruffled its plumage and then took off from a standstill to go soaring out the window, light as—well, a feather.

Scrolls, I reflected, were also very melodramatic. All pseudo-ancient and shit. Nonetheless I unrolled it and looked.

There was no signature, and precious few words, but it didn't matter.

_Mudblood's onto you. Don't give her anything to be onto, or you'll be receiving a lot more than a letter._

Daddy dearest had spoken.

I tapped a fork on the table bemusedly and read the note again. It didn't take long, of course. This looked bad. In addition, it exacerbated my headache something awful. I tried to take a sip of orange juice, but the pulp stuck in my throat like a crowd squeezing through a bottleneck. Accordingly, I proceeded to snatch someone's unattended goblet of water and empty it. Reviving liquid life poured down my throat. It felt a damn sight better than my figurative language was turning out.

I put the cup back down and monitored it out of the corner of my eye until its owner sought it again. He was some dark-haired, heavy-browed, thick-headed, Neanderthal sort of individual, and he glanced into his glass and then looked around bewilderedly. I made a point of staring vaguely off into space. That blankness was the ultimate alibi—though if it had been me, the clueless kid would have been my primary suspect. Likely he'd have been too busy thinking to figure out which drink was his.

Fortunately, my Neanderthal neighbor wasn't quite so astute, and my crime went unpunished.

That was all right, in terms of karma and universal justice and all that. My father was probably going to kick my ass soon enough, and if there was anything left of me, Harry Potter would spit on it and Ron Weasley would grind it into the pavement with his heel.

I considered how I was going to wreak my bloody revenge on Granger. Stupid thing to do—get my father into this. Lucius Malfoy prowling around this dump of a school looking for problems was the dead last thing we needed.

It was hard enough thinking through my hellish headache, and ignoring McGonagall's droning about Transfiguration-this and Transfiguration-that made it verge on impossible.

"Mister Malfoy?" she said near the zenith of my inattentiveness, in that sniffy you're-in-trouble-young-man voice of hers.

"Yeah?" I muttered back. It wasn't the response she was looking for, but I was too strung out and pissed off to give a damn.

"Would you care to answer the question?" she inquired pointedly.

"Not really," I replied truthfully. Don't all the parables for children proclaim that honesty is the best policy? …Besides, I didn't know what the question _was_.

"Ten points from Slytherin," she noted calmly.

I shrugged. It wasn't like we'd ever win anything with the Implausible Potter-Man patrolling the halls of Hogwarts, besting endless exams with a single stroke of his quill and snatching honorable victory from the jaws of humiliating defeat in everything from Quidditch games to duels with Voldemort. I wanted to say that nobody that smooth could possibly be real, but he was. The stupid asshole.

It wasn't even Potter I was really begrudging at that particular moment. Not McGonagall either, as much of a smarmy bitch as she was. No, it was Hermione Granger that I was going to kick the shit out of.

If you'll pardon my ending a sentence with a preposition.

Just after the lunch rush I found a group of Ravenclaw First and Second Years. The exalted trio of my enemies loitered not far off. No one had seen me, because I didn't need an Invisibility Cloak to walk quietly with my head down, and that was all it usually took. Nonchalantly, I tossed a smoke bomb into the midst of the knot of kids. There were sparks, then a bang, then a beautiful plume of navy blue smoke that blossomed outward and spread to create a low-hanging cloud. Stupid boys shouted out awkward curses to seem tough, and the girls who had been flirting with them released ear-splitting shrieks that would have made a banshee proud. Then, utterly predictably, the three idiot Gryffindors, in the heroic meddling tradition of their house, hastened to the rescue by diving without hesitation into the sulfurous chaos.

Self-righteous fools. They were going to get themselves killed that way, one of these days. My personal hope was for sooner rather than later.

It was a small matter to catch Granger's sleeve and, before she'd even realized what was happening, drag her into a conveniently-located janitor's closet and slam the door. There were a lot of those closets around. I suppose when you have one man doing the janitorial duties for an entire castle, he needs a couple of good closets here and there.

I'd shoved Granger down onto a box of latex gloves, muttered "_Expelliarmus_," and caught her wand in one hand before she'd finished blinking acrid smoke out of her yes. The first thing she did was reach for her wand, and the second thing she did was frown at me when she saw that I had it.

"You look terrible," she said.

"Go fuck yourself, Granger," I responded calmly.

"You know," she remarked, "maybe I would, if you hadn't _locked me in a closet_."

"Know what, Granger?" I countered. "I wouldn't have had to lock you in a closet if you hadn't been stupid enough to go to my father behind my back." When she only snorted, I found myself scowling petulantly. At least the relative darkness was easy on my eyes and my throbbing head. "Know what'll happen if he finds out about all the shit going down here, Granger? He'll fucking slaughter me, that's what." I jammed her wand in a pocket next to mine. My hands were shaking so hard that I thought I might drop it.

"You're really pale," Granger told me tentatively, standing slowly. "Are you okay?"

"I need a fucking cigarette," I muttered. I patted a few pockets before remembering that I wasn't dumb enough to carry evidence around with me.

Granger's hand was on my shoulder. "Draco—" she began softly.

I batted it away. "Fuck off," I snapped.

"Ever thought about what'll happen if you keep this up, Draco?" she asked sharply, sounding remarkably similar to McGonagall. "I have. You want to die in a gutter somewhere, Draco Malfoy? Your dad would be real proud of _that_, wouldn't he? Think again, stupid. You're letting him down. You're letting down everyone who has ever tried to give you a decent life. And you're letting _yourself_ down, because you have more potential than just about anybody here, and you're wasting it."

She was like a fly, buzzing insistently around my head, tickling my ears. I tried to swat at her, but she ducked my hand easily and then held it fast in both of hers, one of which had a knit glove on it. "Listen to me, Draco," she persisted. "Think about it. Do you really want to be this way for the rest of your life?"

"You gonna' read my palm next?" I snapped, trying to jerk my hand away. Maybe, I reflected, she'd let go if I bit her.

I heard the door open behind me, and Granger whipped around to look. I turned, too, and the rapid motion made me dizzy.

But not as much as did the punch that Ronald Weasley slammed into my face with a strength I never would have attributed to him.

My head rang, and spots danced in front of my eyes. Trying to force them away, I swung back blindly, and my fist connected with something solid. Glass tinkled and sliced vindictively into my knuckles.

Harry Potter said, "Jesus Christ!", and Granger gasped out, "Don't rub your eyes!"

As my vision cleared, I could make out a large, red-haired object moving towards me, curses spewing from its mouth. I came at it with a lacerated fist raised. I went for the figure's neck, and he went for my face.

My hands grappling their way around Weasley's throat, I shoved him up against the wall and tried to center my slippery palms, but I couldn't get any traction due to the quantity of blood on my hands. Ron kicked like a thing possessed, and his clenched fist caught me under the chin. Inadvertently I bit my lip, hard, and blood ran hot and thick over my tongue even as Harry Potter grabbed the back of my clothes and yanked. Overpriced robes gave way with a sound like a rent slashed through the very fabric of the universe, but I pulled away and pressed my thumb hard against Weasley's windpipe. Urgently someone's fingers scrabbled against me. I was too preoccupied with strangling the flame-haired rat in front of me to react, but even as I dodged another vicious blow from Weasley's foot and the desperate rake of his fingernails that immediately followed, Potter jerked me back with more strength than I could fight. The next thing I knew, I was lying flat on the dirty floor, and Granger was pointing a wand in my face—whose I couldn't even tell.

If that wasn't bullshit, I didn't know what was. Three against one, from the world's leading proponents of fair play? What crap is that?

Honestly.


	11. Bitter Victory

_Author's Note: This is the penultimate chapter. Get your kicks now before it's OVER… Or don't. That's cool, too._

_Props to Wikipedia and Harry Potter Lexicon, whence I steal many tidbits of information that would otherwise be entirely inaccessible to me._

HERMIONE

We had some trouble finding the entrance to Dumbledore's office because Harry's glasses were in a very bad way, which compromised his navigating skills considerably. As I had made him tell me very early in our acquaintance, Harry had myopia, and in addition, just about everything was fuzzy without his lenses in place. He attempted to hold the remains of his glasses in front of his eyes, alternating between them with the one intact lens, and did a lot of squinting. There was a series of spiteful little cuts on his right cheek where the glass had shattered on it, and one shallow, thin, arching one that was scabbing over on his eyelid. It looked like he'd get a black eye as well, as if the existing damage wasn't enough.

The rest of us didn't look too healthy, either. Ron had some pretty distinct bruises in the shape of fingers around his neck that were turning a very visible purple against his skin, and he'd split a knuckle and was clutching the wound as if cradling a small child. As for me, I was just in a general state of disarray.

It was Draco who had fared the worst. First of all, there was the startling contusion on his cheek from where Ron had hit him initially—a nice, oddly-shaped patch with rising hints of purple and a dark red. His right hand was still bleeding halfheartedly in the myriad places where Harry's glasses had wreaked havoc on it, and there were scratches on his face from Ron's fingernails, one of them seeming to tend towards severe given the way that it was leaking blood as well. He was limping a little and trying to hide it.

I would have been trying to help Harry figure out where we were going, but I was a little preoccupied with giving Ron warning looks when he seemed ready to menace Malfoy and avoiding the looks Malfoy gave _me_—glares laced with the kind of potent disgust and venomous rage that couldn't be contained for long. Plus I was holding two wands, Malfoy's and mine, to ensure that he didn't try to pull anything. It didn't seem too implausible, even now. Especially now.

Somehow, likely much by luck, we managed to stumble onto the right location. A gargoyle gazed at us blankly.

"Uh, Cauldron Cakes," Harry said. "Chocolate Frogs. Pumpkin Pasties. Uh, Fudge Flies. Damn it. Ron, what's all that stuff your brothers sell?"

Ron didn't answer.

"Forget it," Harry muttered. He chewed on his lip. "Lessee… Pepper Imps? Peppermint Toads? Umm… Sugar quills?"

"The password is candy?" I asked slowly. When he nodded, I racked my brain. "Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans? Drooble's Best Blowing Gum? Chocoballs?"

"Ice Mice," Harry said. "Jelly Slugs. Oh, all the Weasley stuff—uh, Nosebleed Nougat. Fever Fudge. Fainting Fancy. Canary Creams. Help me out, Ron; they're _your_ brothers."

The gargoyle continued to look at us stonily. So did Ron.

"Um, Ton-Tongue Toffees," I supplied. "Oh, and Licorice Wands, but those aren't Weasley—"

The gargoyle shifted, revealing a few stone steps, and continued to twirl slowly upward.

"Quick!" Harry urged, leaping onto the first one. Grudgingly, Ron followed. Draco allowed a few steps to rise past us despite my protests before he would take his place on one, likely as a statement of his distaste for Harry and Ron. Muttering vituperatively, I jumped on after him and waited, anticipation and anxiety melting into a tingling mixture in my veins, and clenched my fingers carefully around the two wands in my possession. I hoped Harry had a plan, because I didn't.

We went straight through the oak door, barging in with a brazen and kind of desperate sort of impoliteness, and Albus Dumbledore looked up at us and paused. Bushy white eyebrows lifted slowly as he took in the extent of our injuries and prominent dishevelment.

Harry pointed an indicting finger at Malfoy, who was glowering at him formidably. "Sorry to bother you, sir, but we—Ron and I—caught him harassing Hermione. In a _closet_."

I tried to fight down the blush climbing my cheeks like ivy on a stone wall. _Way to make it sound shady, Harry, _I thought.

"He was probably going to do something horrible, sir, knowing Malfoy, so we…intervened. Solve the problem before it starts, I guess."

"That's not even the problem," I interrupted. When everyone looked at me, except Malfoy, who continued to attempt to incinerate Harry with his eyes, I went on. "It's not. The _problem_ is that he smokes and drinks, and he's going to _kill_ himself if he doesn't stop." Now I had Malfoy's attention, too.

"What?" Harry and Ron said at once. It was the first word the latter had uttered in many long minutes.

Malfoy's blazing eyes burned at the floor again. "It wouldn't be a _problem_," he snapped, "if you hadn't told my _father_."

"What?" Harry repeated, looking to Dumbledore bewilderedly. "I mean, I didn't know…that was possible here…"

The headmaster smiled a sad, weary smile. "Very little in this world is impossible, Harry," he responded gently. "Allow me to assure you that this is not the first time I have seen this happen—nor the second, or the third. There is a lot of pressure to succeed here, more in some cases than others, and invariably that regrettable circumstance breeds some students who seek alternative avenues to relieve that pressure. It is certainly not the proudest of our traditions, but it is among them nonetheless."

Ron and Harry were still blinking, dumbly and in disbelief.

"But…here…" Harry began again, hopelessly.

"Oh, come on," I interrupted, trying to soften my impatience. "Do you really think you can jam a bunch of stupid teenagers into one place and not expect this to happen?"

Dumbledore smiled that same horrible, defeated smile and looked to Harry, who shook his head and fell silent. The headmaster turned to Malfoy.

"Draco," he said quietly—and more kindly than anyone else in the room would have managed, "you have a variety of choices now. Do you know what you intend to do?"

"Yes," Malfoy spat. "I'm getting out of this hellhole." At our shock, he glared at us petulantly. "Go ahead and celebrate," he continued, his lip curling. "I'm sick and tired of this same old shit every day. I'm tired of the dorms. I'm tired of the food. I'm tired of the moving passageways and the doors that go nowhere and the teachers playing favorites. I'm tired of the quill pens and the idiotic rules and the amnesty for the—" Here he sneered at Harry. "—_heroes_ who break them. I'm tired of the candles and the one janitor and his stupid cat and the Quidditch games and the pranks and the homework and the detentions and all of _you_." His voice was gaining volume as he went, working its way up to a shout. "You lot most of all. You're just disgusting. And so _naïve_. Everybody is here. This place'll hire any old hack—how many teachers have turned out to be 'evil' and whatnot? I've lost _count_, that's how bad it is. And _honestly_. There's a snake in the walls paralyzing kids and a known murderer running around, and nobody closes down the school? The passwords to the places kids _sleep_ are just verbal, and perfectly audible to _anybody_ in hearing range? Anybody who wants one can buy an Invisibility Cloak and go sneaking around running amok, and anyone can go gallivanting off into the middle of a forest full of freaks so long as he doesn't get caught? How many times have we been infiltrated, and still everyone's always just saying it'll be okay and hoping the school will stay open? Am I really the only person who can see how ridiculously _dangerous _that is? Am I really the only one who thinks this is all just _stupid_? Is it possible that I'm the only person who'd like nothing better than to get the _fuck_ out of here?"

The silence in the room was unmarred but for his faint panting when Draco finished. Dumbledore watched him motionlessly, his hands laid on his desk, his fingers arranged in the shape of a steeple. There was a glimmer in his deep blue eyes, and I couldn't discern whether it was pity, sorrow, disappointment, or some combination of the three.

"Where would you like to go, Draco?" the headmaster asked softly just before the mortified silence grew too heavy to bear.

"I don't care," Malfoy mumbled, kicking at the rug moodily, shrouded only in the remaining wisps of his former anger. Most of it had dissipated into the air over the course of the tirade, and the fight had gone out of him now. He'd said what he'd needed to say. "There's got to be a million schools, given how many Quidditch teams there are. And there's got to be one better than this one where they speak the right language and all."

"When you choose one," Dumbledore replied, his gaze on the boy before him, his eyes entirely unreadable now, "I will personally write you a recommendation, if you like."

"Sure," Malfoy muttered. "Thanks." Summarily he turned to go.

"You're leaving?" I asked hesitantly.

"Pretend you care," he retorted acerbically.

"If I didn't care," I shot back, "I wouldn't _be _here."

He looked at me for a few seconds, and then he lowered his eyes, shook his head, jammed his hands in his pockets, and disappeared out the door.

Indignantly I tried to resist the tears that pricked at my eyes. "Jerk," I whispered to myself.

"Miss Granger," Dumbledore interjected carefully, "do you think I could speak to you?"

Obediently I tore my eyes away from the door, nodded, and sat down in the armchair indicated.

"Are we to go, then, sir?" Harry inquired. At some motion that I couldn't see, because I was looking at my folded hands in my lap, they went.

"If you wouldn't mind," Dumbledore said then, "I would be very much obliged if you were willing to tell me the whole story."

So I told him. I told him everything, sitting in the big, overstuffed armchair in his odd office, and I cried a lot. He subsequently conjured a lot of tissues, and I subsequently soaked them all. I felt a little better after that—hollow, at least, and therein less susceptible to the wormwood I'd been served. It was going down easier now. At least my fears and worries weren't a precious, perilous secret anymore. At least, if Draco Malfoy had been telling the truth, I wouldn't have to fear for and worry about him ever again. And he'd take all my hopes and dreams and adoration with him, whether he realized it or not.

I had seen a problem, and, in the usual busybody fashion, I had sought to fix it. Now I had succeeded. Triumph had never tasted so cold, empty, and cruel.


	12. Denouement

_Author's Note: This is it, folks. The last chapter. I apologize for the disappointing ending, but it was really the only logical conclusion I could see given the story that decided to take place._

DRACO

I ran into Snape on my way to the dorm room—literally ran into him, as I was turning a corner. A book about some deeply obscure potion-related concepts went tumbling to the floor. One about the first World War followed it, curiously enough.

"Sorry," I said, jumping up, gathering both of them, and trying to hand them back to him before he'd even finished picking himself up off the floor with all the dignity he could muster.

He collected himself and snatched the books back, freeing one hand to smooth his robes imperiously. The look he gave me was nothing short of mistrustful. "Where are you going?" he demanded.

"Home," I answered. I intended for it to come out like thunder, like a beacon, with all the grandeur and confidence the decision deserved, but it…didn't.

Professor Snape stared at me for a few seconds. "You're leaving the school, do you mean?"

I nodded confirmation. "Forever, if I get my way."

Shining black eyes like polished onyx appraised me momentarily. Then their owner turned, started down the hallway, and remarked over his shoulder, "Come with me, Mister Malfoy."

Given that it was my last day, I considered telling him to go fuck himself, but Snape, at least, had been relatively good to me over the years. So I followed.

Momentarily, he was unlocking a door I'd never seen and ushering me inside. The room within looked like a small foyer, humble but comfortable, well- and warmly-lit. The wallpaper was a creamy yellow striped with a pale green, and there were bookshelves crammed full of books about every imaginable period in history next to oddities beyond imagining—tiny perpetual motion machines and pewter models of dragons, knickknacks of every variety, and a slightly blurry picture of a man standing with his arms out in front of a line of approaching tanks.

My Potions professor went over to the wide fireplace and considered the flames within it for a moment. He looked at me, and then he took from the mantle a hinged box of slightly tarnished silver set in intricate, twisting designs and opened the lid. _Für Elise_ began to play, quietly and serenely, in the plinking voice of an old music box. He selected a pinch of Floo Powder from it and tossed his acquisition on the fire, and then he replaced the box carefully, almost reverently, and looked to me.

"If you'd like to go before your nerve fails you," he noted calmly, "I'll see that your possessions get sent along after."

I looked at him—really looked. And for the first time I realized how desperately lonely Severus Snape was.

"Thanks," I said. I moved towards the fireplace.

"One more thing," he interjected. When I turned, he took my hand firmly. "Good luck, Draco," he told me solemnly.

"Thank you," I said again. Then he released me, and I said the words, stepped into the flames, and closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, I was in my mother's room.

She was sitting on the bed reading a book, and she looked up at me with some surprise. "What are you doing here?" she asked.

"Good to see you, too, Mother," I muttered.

"But Draco, dear, isn't school in session? I would have thought—"

"I quit school, Mother," I interrupted.

She stared at me. "But, Draco…"

I was halfway to the door, and I threw a few unnecessary words over my shoulder. "Is Father in his study?"

"I suppose he is, but, Draco—"

I closed the door behind me. She was so _weak_. She'd never understand.

I stopped off at my bedroom first. The dresser loomed and the bed lurked; the closet gaped and the lamps glinted. Even the cleanliness was unnerving somehow—it was too organized, too neat, too perfect. It seemed almost sterilized. It was clear that no one lived here, and it was unclear how anyone ever could.

I took off my robes, even though it was cold in the house—it was always cold in the house; nothing had changed for my absence. I folded them and laid them on my bed. I unknotted my tie and dropped it on top, and I straightened my vest a little. Then I went to the study.

Silently I stood before the door. Seconds trickled by. I fortified myself with one last deep breath, suppressed a shiver, and knocked on the door.

"Who is it?" my father's voice inquired disinterestedly.

"It's me," I called back.

There was a pause.

"Come in," he permitted.

I opened the door and slipped inside. My father gave me a moment to try not to fidget under his faultlessly level gaze.

"So you left, did you?"

I nodded.

Absently he tapped the end of his quill on his desk blotter, running one long finger along the line of his jaw as he considered the information.

"I don't believe I can blame you unduly for that," he decided at last. "That school damn near drove me mad, and it doesn't surprise me in the least to know it did the same to you. I presume you intend to find a different one?"

I nodded again.

"Yes, higher education is a gift and all that tripe… I believe there's a school only for pure-bloods in Northern Ireland, if you would be willing to put up with those ridiculous accents of theirs."

Once more, I nodded.

"Excellent. Is that settled, then? Anything else you can think of?"

"Only that…" I swallowed. "Well, Dumbledore said he'd write me a recommendation—if I need it, you know."

"Not from him, you don't," my father rejoined immediately. "That will be all. If you're hungry, the elves will find you something."

That was my cue to leave. I started to obey it.

"Oh, and, Draco?"

I turned and waited.

My father smiled his thin predator's smile. "Don't give me cause to write you any more letters. Ever."

I nodded and fled.

It was impossible to sleep on my bed. The sheets were like silk, slippery and cold, and the mattress was so soft as to envelop me like a strangling vine. After two hours of tossing, turning, and trying to avoid getting eaten by it, I got up, crossed the room, drew back the curtains that concealed the window-seat, and curled up on it. The view out was hazy at best, and the glass panes did little to dull the frigidness outside, but it wasn't so stiflingly opulent as the bed, and that was what mattered. I pressed my hand against one of the square panes and drew it back wet, admiring the palm print I'd left in the condensation.

As much as I might have hated it, as much as it might have hated me, Hogwarts had taught me a lot. It had humbled me, it had chastised me, and it had brought me reluctantly to my knees, time and time again. It was a place where I didn't win at every game and didn't ace every class just because I was rich. It was a place where I was hemmed in on all sides by Mudbloods and half-bloods and pure-bloods alike, and all of them, including the Mudbloods—especially the Mudbloods—had a viable chance of being better than me at something or at everything. I hated even to admit it, but the school had changed me. Likely it had changed me for the better.

The drug withdrawals were dying down by the time my parents saw me off at Saint Thomas's Academy a week after I'd come home. Saint T's, as some idiots apparently called it, was indeed stringently restricted to pure-bloods, and male ones at that. But because it didn't discriminate between nationalities, it recruited widely, and the student population was actually considerably larger than the one at Hogwarts. And, even more unlike Hogwarts, there were all different types of kids there. There were boys descended from the greatest American Indian shamans and boys who claimed to be related to Middle Eastern djinns of extraordinary power; boys like me who lived in England, and boys from Iceland and India and Brazil and Japan. Some of them spoke only the sparest English, and some of them sounded like they ate dictionaries for breakfast. Wands varied, attire varied, extent of snobbery varied, but the one thing that didn't was the blood. And maybe that was the way it should have been. Maybe it wasn't. In any case, this wasn't Hogwarts, not at all. The dean looked like an ex-con and promised me twice in the first three minutes of our initial meeting that he would wring my neck personally if I put a toe out of line. It looked like he meant it. And it looked like this gluttonous excess of structure and rules was the overdose I'd needed all along.

At Saint T's, owls stayed only in their proper place, which was in an isolated building separated from the school by a cobblestone pathway. If you wanted to see if you'd received mail, you had to go check. One member of a very large support staff sorted the incoming messages (which were very often on white paper or stationery and were usually delivered by human mailmen instead of avian ones) into neat piles for different students and filed them alphabetically.

After about a week of keeping my toes well behind the line, I went down and found my owl where he was waiting patiently. I took some binder paper I'd bought from the student store and folded it up. I wrote _Hermione Granger_ on the back. I unfolded it again and chewed on the end of my ballpoint pen a little. Then I scribbled _Thank you for trying_ on the inside, tied it to my owl's waiting leg, and sent him off. I watched him go until the last feather had disappeared into the orange glow of twilight.

The next day, he came back. The response was written on a scrap of parchment.

_Pretend you care._

I chewed a little more on my pen, realized I might be ingesting something less than healthful, and stopped. Then, on a new piece of paper, I wrote, _If I didn't care, I wouldn't be here._

A day later, the reply came. It was three words, but that was enough.

_How are things?_

I whipped out my pen.

_All right. It's a bit of a culture shock here. Shocking because I've discovered that there are, in fact, other cultures. How are things with you?_

She wrote back, _Good. Your little cronies just wander around aimlessly without you, you know. They look like they've lost their mothers in the supermarket. Discovering anything interesting about said other cultures?_

I chewed on the end of my pen a little too hard, and it splattered viscous blue ink all over my face, sour and acrid in my mouth.

And somehow, I didn't care.

_Author's Note Again: Yup. This is it. If you've stuck with me this far, I'd be really happy to get a few words of commentary, criticism, or just random gobbledygook, if that's the way you roll. Tell me what you think. I would very much like to know._

_And if you did enjoy this little diversion, I think I'm going to try a bit of first-person limited with Lupin next, so stay tuned._


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